Dangerous Hits in Hockey - Avoidable and Unnecessary

Last week Jeff Klein and Stu Hackel wrote a piece exploring what might be done to reduce dangerous hits in the NHL. The following is my commentary on some of the themes that were brought up.

1) Fine coaches or teams after three players have been suspended.

Financial punishment following the suspension of three players addresses the issue of having “a bad apple” on the team. That is, a lone individual who acts recklessly and independently of the mission and direction of his coach and organization. I have two problems with this, first, there is no objective way to choose the optimal suspension level. If player safety is truly the key objective, fines would be handed out after one suspension. My second problem rests in that any level higher than one creates a situation where the rule can be gamed. For example, if the suspension level is three, a team with two suspensions may behave dissimilarly compared to a team with no suspensions. A team without suspension may feel licensed to carry out excessively aggressive hits understanding that any suspension will not result in fines.

Who should be suspended? Players, coach, or team?

Ideally, because dangerous hits in hockey are avoidable and unnecessary, I would fine all parties. That would clearly send a message that dangerous play will not be tolerated.

If I could only pick one party it would be the coaches. I’d be open to discussion on this one but even though the players are the ones carrying out the act, every team has players that know their job isn’t to score goals, isn’t to play defense...their only job is physically punish whoever they can, as often as they can. Furthermore, if they will be cut from the team unless they behave this way, the have a really strong incentive to not question their coach.

2) “But beyond individual responsibility, Shanahan acknowledged that the culture of the game — one in which “you’re allowed to hit, you’re asked to hit, you’re supposed to hit and you’re supposed to hit hard” — might constitute a bigger obstacle.”

I beg readers to not be trapped between the false dichotomy of either allowing dangerous hits or eliminating checking (and more generally, physical play) in hockey.

Dangerous hits overwhelmingly happen in three ways:

a) Checking another player near the boards when his back it to you. Unfortunately, the first ice hockey game I ever played in a player was carried off on a stretcher because he was hit from behind and felt tingling in his neck. Two years later, after an uptick of youth players being paralyzed, almost all of the teams I played against in California added stop signs (see picture, left) to their jerseys.

b) A player leads a check with his hands and/or elbow and strikes the head of his opponent. This is actually dangerous for everyone involved. I’ve seen players break their wrists and elbows because they missed the players and slammed themselves against the boards.

c) An offensive player skates north-south with his head down (this is analogous to wide receiver going across the middle in football). In fairness, this is completely fair game. Defensemen are taught to jump up in plays and make a hit when a forward has his head down. The difference between hockey and football is that in hockey skating north-south isn’t that much of an advantage. If a player streaks ahead expecting a breakaway pass the defensemen won’t be in a position to take his head off and more importantly, the forwards on the ice are almost always in a position to weave laterally taking away the opportunity for a big hit. Moral of the story: keep your head up.

3) “We see a player where, maybe three, four or five years ago, really could have laid somebody out, and they minimize a check or they turn away from a check, or they simply stick-check to separate a man from the puck,” Shanahan added. “It doesn’t get a video. It doesn’t get mention on a blog. It just gets noticed by us.”

This is completely valid. If you’re not familiar with hockey it may sound surprising that players would willingly go easy on their opponents at the professional level. However, I can’t stress enough that in hockey there is no such thing as, “the game is too fast,” as often whined about in the NFL. There is no circumstance where a dangerous play is completely unavoidable. And equally important, illegal hits don’t give you a competitive advantage (literally speaking, if the opposing player is skilled and is forced to leave the game than such an action would benefit your team but in terms of dangerous hits leading to a scoring opportunity, it really doesn’t work that way in hockey).

Two more points:

4) Policy changes regarding big hits in the NHL will not be dictated by the NFL.

The NHL, like every professional sport, must be hypersensitive of its image. However, no one in hockey leads with their head when checking another player so I’d imagine that the NHL will be able deflect much of the attention that the NFL has received.

5) Anything else that can be done?

Expand the rink size to that which the olympics are played on. The difference amounts to 10 feet in length and 13 feet in width (210 ft long and 98 ft wide compared to 200 ft long and 85 ft wide). The larger ice surface gives players more time to move the puck and forces defenseman to play more conservatively.

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