Note: More on Morrison and Wheat's “Pulling the Goalie Revisited”

This is a note regarding the excellent article “Misapplications Reviews: Pulling the Goalie Revisited” by Morrison and Wheat [Morrison, D. G., R. D. Wheat. 1986. Misapplications reviews: Pulling the Goalie revisited. Interfaces16(6) 28–34.]. Being a hockey fan, I thoroughly enjoyed the article. I think it is an interesting example of modeling and optimization, well suited for teaching in a NHL city. However, I teach in Edmonton, the recently acclaimed hockey capital of North America, and my students felt uneasy about the first assumption made by the authors, “when both teams have their goalies on the ice, the two teams are of equal ability and each scores goals at a constant rate of L per minute.”