meow wrote:I don't think guys get hurt when it's a 50/50 puck. Guys get hurt when a forwards reaches/shoves in desperation. Really, what I want this to solve is the useless reaching forwards do. They have next to zero chance of negating the icing and it's a senseless dangerous play.
Look at Pikanen's injury from this year. Brower makes no attempt to play the puck at first. He hooks Pikanen's hands and throws him off balance. Then Fedun's injury from last years preseason. Nystrom is clearly boxed out from touching it and he causes Fedun to lose his balance and break his femur.
I'm all for races, but using the hashes and dots as an imaginary line incase a guy loses an edge or something he can still recover before going into the end wall. And these injuries are so much more horrific because when else are guys going full tilt top speed when a collision occurs? Not all that often, but it does happen.
Fair. I chalk those plays up more to just being dirty plays than an indictment of icing personally. But that's a fair point. I'm all for avoiding injuries where we can avoid them. But I'm uncomfortable changing long-standing things to make a very, very minimal impact. There are others more pressing things to be worrying about than icing if you want to make the game safer...but that's not the point of this particular conversation either.