What Needs To Be Done To Get Rid Of Headshots?



Marc Savard May Never Play Again. Is This What You Want, NHL?

 It's only a matter of time before someone dies from headshots.

                

For a long time fighting was the talk of The NHL. But with the percentage of fighting going down, it's not an issue anymore. Sidney Crosby, Marc Savard, Max Pacioretty, Andy McDonald, David Perron, Kurt Sauer, Ratis Ivananis, Mathew Lombardi, Jim Slater, Peter Mueller..... need I Continue? Do we want to see someone die? What if Pacioretty died from his hit by Chara? Would the NHL Do something then?


Air Canada, one of the NHL's largest financial corporate backers, is threatening to withdraw its sponsorship if the league doesn't take "immediate" and "serious" action on headshots. So far, the only thing Gary Bettman has done is that all players have to be checked out by team doctors to see if he is fine. If that's all that’s getting done........Air Canada won't be the only major company backing out.


Players WILL die if the rules stay the way they are. Players need to be SEVERLY punished. Of Course some no talent, 4^th line thug will go try to take off Alex Ovechkin’s head. What does he have to lose? A 5 game suspension? Wow... So now he doesn’t play his 2-3 minutes a game? What about Ovechkin? What if he can never play again? That’s a little price to pay for knocking out a superstar for a long period of time.


Mario Lemieux is fed up. He wrote a letter to the NHL suggesting actions the league should take.  The fines for teams with a suspended player would range from $50,000 for a one- or two-game suspension to $1 million for a team whose player is suspended for more than 15 games.


 "The current system punishes the offending player but does very little to deter such actions in the future. We need to review, upgrade and more clearly define our policies in this regard, so that they can provide a meaningful deterrence and effectively clean up the game,” said Lemieux, who is faced with the decision of what to do with Matt Cooke, who has a history with headshots. On March 7, 2010 game against the Boston Bruins in which Cooke delivered a blow to the head of Savard, causing a concussion. Savard missed almost two months, and Cooke was not suspended.


When Daniel Paille of the Bruins injured Raymond Sawada, it was clear he was head hunting. Andrew Ference made it clear that it was unacceptable, calling out his teammate on a radio station.

"I mean it’s a bad hit, right? That’s what they’re trying to get rid of and you can’t be hypocritical about it when it happens to you, and say its fine when your teammate does it. It’s a hit they’re trying to get rid of. I mean you hear it from every player after they do it, they feel bad, and same thing, I talked to Danny and he feels bad. It’s tough, that back checking forward, to make those kind of hits, and it’s so hard to do it in a clean fashion, with the new rules. It is what it is. He hurt the guy, and I’m sure he’ll have a conversation."

So What Needs To Be Done?

Suspend the player long term. Not 2 games, not 5, BUT 20-82 games. Players don’t play hockey to get hurt and have mental illness. If the players realize its not worth getting suspended for long periods of time, they may stop.

Syko

Twitter.com/sykoshockeybuzz