The NHL Doesn’t Really Care About Player Safety
Here we are three days into 2015, and already headlines are piling up about player injuries. Injuries will happen but it seems hard to believe the NHL really cares about player safety. Maybe they need to take more time to look at player equipment and less time scouting the next outdoor game. NHL players are getting cut, hit, and all but dismembered in today’s games and it’s time the NHL and the NHLPA figure out what to do.
Today’s players are bigger faster and care much less about each other than those of generations ago. Maybe it’s all about the money or maybe it’s the pressure put
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on them by agents, owners and coaches; I’ll even toss the fans into this mess as well. If the NHL really did care about player safety they would start to implement real suspensions and they would take a long hard look at how they patrol the game. All too often officials are making judgement calls and so is the NHLDOPS.
If there are no hard guidelines for handling head shots, and cheap hits than how can the NHL fix the mounting injury problems. With that in mind, accidents happen and that’s all part of the game, but this week alone there have been to skate cutting injuries. Could it be time to mandate a full cage, or a combo cage? Also, maybe the NHL needs to make Kevlar hockey socks a staple in today’s NHL. There is an entire line of cut-resistant hockey products, and very few players wear them. I’ve heard their com plants about weight and comfort, and frankly I don’t care.
Players as well as the NHL are become part of the issue when it come to player safety in the NHL. In order for things to improve players need to start caring and feeling the hits. Yes, they need to feel what they are doing. Right now a player can skate at 20MPH and hit another player without feeling so much as a bump. Maybe it’s time for the NHL and the equipment makers to sit down and figure out how to start cutting down on padding. If a player feels the hit and is sore from it they will be less likely to deliver an unnecessary check. That would in no way take real check and hits out of the game, but hitting from behind and the cross ice charges should start to become a thing of the past.
Injuring an opponent is one thing, but suffering an injury your self is another and no NHL player or teams will want their players risking man games lost because they chose to make a stupid check when it wasn’t really necessary.
If the NHL is really concerned with their players safety it might be time to rethink the equipment and rethink how that call the game. After all this year’s Winter Classic had the lowest numbers in history of the Winter Classic. Clearly the polish has come off the event so maybe the NHL can worry more about their players and less about filling their pockets.