Much Nothing About Ado

Gary Bettman's 5-point plan to make the media hurting stop improve player safety:

• Brendan Shanahan will work with the NHLPA on equipment safety
• Players will be removed from the ice if they show concussion symptoms after a hit
• Additional penalties or fines may be handed out to teams and coaches for players who are “repeat offenders”
• An engineering firm will evaluate all 30 arenas for safety issues
• A ‘blue-ribbon’ committee of former players will examine topics relevant to the issue

These all sound good, but as with all things political, effectiveness depends more on what gets delivered than what gets announced or who studies what.

The only one with any potential to make even mid-term changes to the game is the engineering study, and that just changes the area in which they play.

Meanwhile, not wanting to be outdone at being seen busy at improving matters, the team GMs today announced this:

The general managers followed commissioner Gary Bettman's lead Tuesday by announcing they'd like to see a tighter enforcement of rules on charging and boarding.

This is nothing more than pandering to the wider world beyond the arena and sports media. If the Prime Minister of Canada is talking about your league, even if it is in a vague passive-aggressive non-descript circular political say-nothing way, you have an image problem. And the way you solve image problems today is you present the image of addressing the issue in a calm, steady, sober manner and hope that the wider world forgets about you before you actually have to produce anything*.

We've talked about the vague bullshit that is the charging rule before**. The question is, how does the "boarding" rule actually stack up?

41.1 Boarding – A boarding penalty shall be imposed on any player or goalkeeper who checks an opponent in such a manner that causes the opponent to be thrown violently in the boards. The severity of the penalty, based upon the degree of violence of the impact with the boards, shall be at the discretion of the Referee.

[...]

Any unnecessary contact with a player playing the puck on an obvious “icing” or “off-side” play which results in that player being knocked into the boards is “boarding” and must be penalized as such. In other instances where there is no contact with the boards, it should be treated as “charging.”

By the rule, any throwing of a player into the boards is boarding, just as any player-on-player check is technically charging. It is more vague regulatory bullshit. The clarification says that the contact has to be "unnecessary", the only purpose of which is to throw the matter back into the hands of the officials to make the instant judgement -- based on whatever directive the league is overtly or covertly giving to officials.

This I think is another example of NHL hypocracy, who insist on the one hand that the officials are given a free hand to enforce the rules -- but at the same time issue directives like this one to "enforce more tightly".

(I also think it is a little amusing to see that technically a goalkeeper can be assessed a boarding penalty, in practice any goalkeeper who is close enough to throw an opposing player into the boards is way hugely out of position.)

The problem, as it is with the headshot issue, is one of determining intent on the part of the checking player. And that, as any good lawyer can tell you, is always doubtful.

One suggestion I found today: On Finishing The Check:

Deeming a player without clear possession of the puck an illegal checking target would most certainly decrease the number of hits in the league [...]

Reducing the situations in which a player can be checked will reduce the opportunity for injury. Of all the noise that has been generated on this issue, this seems like a good place to start.

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*= ...a pretty safe bet these days, but that's a wider problem.

**= even to the point of copy/pasting that sentence from last week's post, yeah, I know.