Proposed NHL Rule Changes: A Brief Look
A quick glance at some of the NHL's proposed rule changes.
The Competition Committee proposed some NHL rule changes on Tuesday. The biggest was proposing that mandatory visors should be grandfathered into the NHL. Apparently there was a large amount of support for that change, no doubt aided by Marc Staal's horrific injury earlier this year.
This was Mathieu Schneider (special assistant to Donald Fehr) on the committee's decision to make the move:
More guys put a visor on after the Staal injury. Every time there's an injury like that, I think you get any player that is playing with a visor starts to think about it, or has his mom calling him or his wife telling him or his kids telling him.
All rule changes have to be approved by the Board of Governors and these are just proposed changes. Keep that in mind as you cycle through these other changes. Elliotte Friedman has all of this on his twitter account:
- All four-minute high sticking penalties will be up for video review.
- The committee has proposed that NHL nets become four inches shallower. There will be no change to the actual opening of the net, this is only to allow there to be move room to maneuver behind the net.
- A group has been proposed to check and evaluate goaltending equipment. And apparently all equipment will be up for review.
- One other big change, from the article linked above, on hybrid icings:
Safety in other aspects of the game was discussed in a meeting at the NHL office in Toronto, including the implementation of hybrid icing. Tested in the American Hockey League during the NHL lockout, racing to an imaginary line across the faceoff dots instead of the puck won't be put into effect immediately but will be tested in all preseason games.
"There are a lot of players that haven't played with it, may not fully understand it, and I think this will give them a better idea of what to expect," Schneider said.
So what do you guys think of the proposed changes?
