The extremes in thecurrent standoffinclude general managers, sponsors and fans who favor a ban on hits to the head and their old-school counterparts who see such a drastic rule change as potentially robbing the league of its rugged appeal just when its popularity is growing.
“The nature of the game is always being changed, but the rules, regulations, understandings and mythologies don’t change,” Ken Dryden, the Hall of Fame goalie from theMontreal Canadiens, said in describing the traditionalist impulse.
“That’s when you get into trouble,” he added,“when you don’t recognize the immense changes on one side, and don’t have the corresponding changes that make sense to the different game that evolves.”
Dryden broke his long silence on hockey matters this month, joining the team sponsorsAir Canadaand Via Rail, and the team ownersMario Lemieuxof Pittsburgh and Geoff Molson of Montreal in urging the league’s general managers to recommend a prohibition of all hits to the head. The International Ice Hockey Federation, theN.C.A.A.and the Ontario Hockey League— all feeder organizations to the N.H.L.— have bans.
At their recentannual meeting, the general managers took a middle path, calling instead for stricter enforcement of boarding and charging rules, and for harsher fines and suspensions. In 2010, the league imposed a partial ban, outlawing blindside hits to the head and those that deliberately target the head. According to league statistics, 14 percent of concussions sustained by N.H.L. players were the result of legal checks to the head, meaning ones delivered from straight ahead.
Still, the N.H.L. remains bound by an ethos of toughness, an arena where fighting is tolerated and even encouraged as rough justice, and where playing through concussions and gruesome lacerations are marks of courage.
A leading voice among traditionalists isToronto Maple LeafsGeneral Manager Brian Burke, who has spoken often about the need to preserve“the fabric of our game.”
Recently, Burke said:“We want that hit in our game. What’s distinctive about our game from anywhere else in the world is the amount of body contact. So we have to try to take out the more dangerous hits and make it safer for the players, but keep hitting in the game.”
The calls for change grew in volume in response to increased speed in the sport, a result of stricter rules against obstruction adopted after the 2004-5 lockout. That change undoubtedly made the game more exciting, but some of the spectacular collisions that followed led to more concussions. And it happened just as scientific evidence was emerging of the long-term damage caused by brain trauma.
Charting a middle course between rock’em, sock’em hockey and greater player safety has long been characteristic of the N.H.L., which has one of the most comprehensive concussion-evaluation and postconcussion return-to-play standards in professional sports. Only in 2009 did theN.F.L.adopt hockey’s protocol.
The N.H.L. policy, in place since 1997, was strengthened this month. Now, a player suspected of having a concussion is taken from the rink to a quiet room and evaluated for 15 minutes by a team doctor. The move was praised by several general managers, including Pittsburgh’s Ray Shero,Carolina’s Jim Rutherford and Buffalo’s Darcy Regier.
“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Shero, who sustained a concussion as a college player and who this season has dealt with concussions to his star player,Sidney Crosby, and his 15-year-old son, Chris.
But traditionalists were not pleased.
“This is an overreaction, a knee-jerk reaction,” one general manager told The Calgary Sun, saying the 15-minute examination period was too long.“This is what doctors told the league is best to do, but we’re the ones to have to put the thing in practice and it doesn’t make sense.”
Dryden, a member of Parliament from Toronto since 2004, said a pattern of resistance to change followed by change was a recurring theme in hockey.
“At one point, one of the prides of hockey is this is a game when you stay on the ice the whole time, like soccer,” he said.“It’s not real hockey if you have substitutions. But substitutions were allowed.
“Then it wasn’t real hockey if you can pass the puck forward— that’s like cheating— instead of skating it forward like an individual. And then it’s not real hockey if you use helmets or goalie masks. And so on and so on.”
To many, there is a sense of inevitability regarding the eventual adoption of a ban on head contact. A poll of Canadian hockey fans by MacLean’s magazine revealed this month that 83 percent support the outlawing of all checks to the head. (And if there is doubt that Canadian fans have gone soft, only 13 percent would outlaw fighting.)Dryden said, however, that today’s traditionalists were unable to conceive of hockey as being hockey if hits to the head were banned. But the faster game has made hockey so dangerous, he said, that change is necessary.
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