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Slashing Mandate Dialed Down... No Surprise

September 25, 2017, 11:50 AM ET [16 Comments]
Paul Stewart
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Am I surprised that the NHL has already issued a revised mandate to dial down on the "strictest possible rule interpretation" standard on slashing penalties? Not one bit. Ditto the faceoff violation mandate that's also been scaled down after it created additional delays and didn't accomplish its goal.

I am all in favor of penalizing bona fide slashes, and I also know that slashing the hand and wrist has become a common tactic. But don't coaches have some responsibility here in coaching their players not to slash rather than to not get caught?

The real elephant in the room here is the question of why there are so many hand and wrist injuries on slashes nowadays and why so many players do it. It's not as simple as "refs dropped the ball on calling it." Rather, it's because today's gloves are not sufficiently protective.

Most players have traded off protection for comfort and, over the years, the gloves got shorter and softer. As a result, players leave themselves more vulnerable to hand injuries. It starts when players are just kids and they get accustomed to playing with these gloves.... and then it becomes their preference. This trend started in the 1980s with the thinner gloves popularized by Mario Lemieux and has continued to this day.

I once reffed an exhibition game in Worcester when Joe Thornton was a rookie with the Bruins. He got slashed on the cuff of his glove and ended up breaking that ulnar bone in his wrist. Even Pat Burns, who was coaching the Bruins at the time, agreed that the outcome came about because Joe was a tall guy wearing gloves that barely covered his wrist. That's the risk these guys take.

The fingers of the current-day gloves are kid leather soft. Again, this is what happens when you trade off protection for comfort: it can turn a well-placed chop on the hand into something more serious than it had to be.

I have issues with much of the equipment that is manufactured today; a lot of it is unsafe at any speed and the elbow pads and shoulder pads are basically lethal weapons. Yes, supply and demand is a factor but so is profit and cost to the manufacturers. The equipment companies charge more for gloves that use less materiel and are less complex to build. Thus they are cheaper to the manufacturer but there is no cost-savings whatsoever to the consumers. Well, did you really think that they were going to charge less?

The gloves nowadays give less protection than the ones my playing contemporaries and I used. The results of a slash are far more likely to have an end result of an injury such as this or Thornton's wrist.

Recall this: elbow pads came down the arm to the top of the glove. The gloves had ribs and extended up to the bottom of the elbow pad. Like interlocking parts, they protected the elbow, fore arm, wrist and hand. Now they mainly protect the bottom line of the equipment companies because player's get insufficient physical protection from them.

As anyone who reads my blog even semi-regularly knows, I have no problem with taking the NHL to task when I think the league is in the wrong, nor do I believe in "superstar treatment" for anyone. In the much-cited case of Sidney Crosby and Marc Methot, I thought the NHL made the right decision when there was no supplementary discipline or fine. It was worthy of a two-minute slashing minor. That's it. It was a routine penalty with a bad outcome.

If a ref is watching a situation where a puck carrier gets chopped on the hand or wrist, yes, it should be called. If not, a supervisor has questions to ask about just what the official was looking at on the play. But as for the initial over-the-top mandate outcome to call anything and everything that could be possibly construed as a slash, it was a bad idea.

Hockey management who are former refs typically know what's right for the game from a rule enforcement perspective. We need to be the courageous advocates for coaching our officials on how to apply judgment and hockey sense.

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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
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