The NHL has announced that it will stop using discs with embedded tracking technology in the near future due to complaints about its performance during the early 2021 season.
The change takes effect from Tuesday night’s games.
The NHL reviewed the first supply of tracking discs it has used and determined that they did not receive “the same precise finishing treatments during the off-season manufacturing process that were used during the Stanley Cup 2020 Playoffs”.
A NHL player told ESPN on Tuesday that the discs were “terrible” and “don’t slip,” adding that the players expressed their displeasure with them.
The league said that a new supply of discs will be available soon and “will undergo appropriate quality control tests” before being used in games. In the meantime, the league has said it will use official game discs for the 2019-20 season. It will also continue to use the player’s optical tracking, which is the other half of the dual tracking system along with the devices inside the disc.
This is the first full disc and player tracking season for the NHL, which promises to provide a significant amount of new data to improve everything from TV broadcasts to sports betting.
The league has been trying to incorporate technology into discs for years, finding the results very ineffective or expensive. This incarnation of the pucks was used during testing and in the postseason during 2020, with a sensor on the puck tracked by 14-16 antennas installed on the beams of the arena.