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The one rule the NHL Research & Development Camp should be testing but isn’t

2010 NHL Research, Development and Orientation Camp

TORONTO, ON - AUGUST 18: NHL scouts watch an on-ice session where new faceoff locations were tested during the 2010 NHL Research, Development and Orientation Camp fueled by G Series on August 18, 2010 in Toronto, Canada. (Photo by Matthew Manor/Getty Images)

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With the NHL rule book being deep enough to cover most instances of play that go on, trying to find new ways of doing things makes sense. With everything they’re working on at this year’s camp, however, there’s one rule tweak that isn’t being examined closer and we’re curious why Brendan Shanahan and company aren’t looking it over.

You’ve seen it happen during a game too many times. A team is trying to play the puck out of their defensive end and a player tries to bounce the puck off the glass and send it down the ice. Instead of putting the puck off the glass and clearing it down for a likely icing call, they miss the glass completely and put the puck in the stands. In the days before the NHL lockout, that would just result in a faceoff in that team’s end while both teams could make changes. Now it’s a minor penalty for the offending player that put the puck off the rink and that’s not right.

Punishing players that do it on purpose to relieve pressure with two minutes in the box and making their team have to kill off a penalty is something we agree with. If you bust a guy that’s absolutely doing it on purpose, then by all means put him in the box. Our issue with the way it’s called, however, lies with how it’s a blanket call. No matter how it ends up over the glass, it’s a penalty. How many times can you count during the season where it’s a player doing it unintentionally that gets booked for a call? Too many to count for our liking and handing out power plays like candy does nothing to solve the issue with flow of the game.

Our solution to this is to treat the puck over the glass as if it was icing. The team dumping the puck into the crowd wouldn’t be allowed to change lines while play is stopped and the faceoff would end up in their end of the ice giving their opponents the offensive starting place they would get whether it was the old rules or the new rules. Since teams that would be putting the puck out of play on purpose would be doing it for the same reason a team would ice the puck, why not just treat it the same way?

Giving out penalties to help boost scoring is something that helped the NHL come flying back out of the lockout. Penalties were at an all-time high thanks to the NHL reemphasizing the rule book and teams piled on the goals at the man advantage. Giving out needless penalties for plays that aren’t even meant to get an edge feels counterproductive to keeping the pace of the game going.

The other side of this is how it works in the playoffs. We know the officials swallow the whistles more in the postseason and we’ve come to accept that. The one time they don’t do it, however, is on plays where the puck is put over the glass. After seeing players get interfered with all over the ice, high sticks missed, and all sorts of other malicious and purposeful illegal activities without a call the puck over the glass call is made every time.

That makes things a bit screwed up and if it’s those calls that officials need to have happen in order to give a team a power play in the playoffs, that’s got more to do with how they’re calling the game and not the rules themselves. Instead of having the added nonsensical controversy, we can just have it treated the way we do icing and call it a day. After all, the last thing anyone wants to see is Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals end up in overtime only to be decided because a defenseman missed hitting the glass with the puck by an inch on an attempted dump out of the zone.

Stop the madness, get rid of this foolish penalty.