NHL reports only 55 players wearing neck guards, despite no shortage of close calls

TORONTO – Every night in the NHL’s Situation Room, the game loggers – the heartbeat of the hockey staff – manually cut and color code hundreds of sequences from each game. Purple is for officiating. Yellow is for penalties and missed calls. Blue is for the coach’s challenges and video reviews.

And red is for injuries and player safety. Among these clips are the dozens of recorded close calls where NHL players narrowly avoid potentially devastating skate-cut injuries.

“You wouldn’t believe how many there are,” said NHL senior EVP of hockey operations Colin Campbell. “We see it almost every night. It’s really quite frightening.”

Still, Campbell informed the league’s 32 general managers Tuesday at their annual meeting in November that only 55 of the 708 skaters are wearing neck guards this season.

That only 7.7 percent of skaters in the competition have chosen to protect their necks seems an incredibly low number considering it’s barely a year later The tragic death of Adam Johnson on the ice when he played professionally for the Nottingham Panthers in Great Britain last October.

The league reported at least positive increases in the use of other cut-resistant protective equipment, including more than 100 players now wearing undergarments with cut-resistant material around the wrists, and even more players wearing similar protection in pants around their ankle and Achilles tendon.

The NHL has done everything it can to encourage, educate and make more cut-resistant equipment available to players. Information is provided and posted in team locker rooms, along with data on the testing of these materials, which makes them approved by the league.

It is the NHL Players’ Association that has opposed mandating a league-wide equipment change based on individual player choice and comfort.

GMs were encouraged Monday to continue those conversations with players.

“Oh, we talk about it a lot,” said Montreal Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes, who previously worked as a player agent and understands the other side. “I appreciate that players have a choice. And I also have two boys who play hockey. They don’t really listen, but I wish they weren’t too proud to wear it for their own safety.

In the year since Johnson’s unimaginable death at age 29, other leagues and levels not bound by collective bargaining agreements have taken the step to require neck guards. Just a week after it happened, the Canadian Hockey League – including the major junior leagues OHL, WHL and QMJHL – made neck guards mandatory. USA Hockey followed suit for all under-18 levels as the sport’s national governing body. And perhaps most importantly, the AHL required all players and on-ice officials to wear neck gaiters before the 2024-2025 season.

Campbell said the NHL’s hope is that players moving from the AHL to the league will already be accustomed to the protection and will see no need to remove it.

“Like sights,” Campbell said. “And helmets for that.”

The AHL has long been a testing ground for the NHL. The AHL mandated visors for eye and face protection before the 2006–07 season; the NHL followed through with its next CBA agreement in 2013, allowing players who played more than 25 games under the old rule to be “grandfathered in” and not wear visors if that was their preference.

This season, some 12 years later, only four NHL skaters are playing without a visor: Jamie Benn, Ryan O’Reilly, Zach Bogosian and Ryan Reaves.

In the meantime, the NHL hopes that more players will investigate or try out the readily available cut-resistant protection, and pray that the close calls the league is following don’t become more than that. It’s almost as if the NHL should ask players to watch a montage of all the near misses before each season starts, in a final plea to reconsider risk versus comfort. As for possibly making neck protectors mandatory in the future, the next CBA negotiations are expected to begin in early 2025.

“We’ll add it to the list,” Campbell said.

Preparing for CBA interviews

Speaking of the upcoming CBA negotiations, the NHL began recruiting GMs for direction on Tuesday as they prepare to meet with the NHLPA.

The league essentially puts it up to the GMs to come up with, in order of priority, a wish list of possible changes they would like to see in the game.

What’s on the table? According to multiple NHL GMs in the room Tuesday, it involves everything from further limiting contract lengths, the arbitration process, instituting a salary cap for the playoffs, reimagining LTIR usage, the recall rule for the post-trade deadline, or even the regular season schedule. format.

Yes, there seems to be a desire to potentially limit contract lengths, as a way to perhaps even save some GMs from themselves. But that’s not universal, as some certainly enjoy spreading out the dollars over a longer period of time to reduce the impact of the cap.

While, as some executives noted after the meeting, they appreciate the commissioner’s office taking their temperatures and gathering feedback, they fully recognize that Gary Bettman and Bill Daly will ultimately determine what is worth fighting for with the NHLPA.

Remembrance of tampering

NHL Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly reminded all 32 General Managers of the league’s tampering rules on Tuesday. Daly said it was a “refresher on what’s allowed and what’s not,” a general list of do’s and don’ts.

The genesis of the memory was the slew of free agent contracts that were reportedly agreed upon one minute after the clock struck noon on July 1 last summer, the first moment teams were even legally allowed to contact UFA players and their representatives. But Daly said that wasn’t the only thing.

One GM said the essence of Daly’s message was short and sweet: “Don’t be the one who gets busted.” If caught, Daly recalls, the penalty is a potentially significant fine and/or the loss of draft pick(s).

GM minutes

The GMs were also reminded that prospect interviews at the Draft Combine must be conducted cordially and professionally, as apparently at least one team has crossed the line in pushing and grilling prospects… Perhaps the biggest talking point was the recent change of NCAA rules regarding deference to CHL player eligibility, including a cross-section of information from Central Scouting head Dan Marr, as well as potential CBA ramifications from league executives. “There’s a lot of debate about that, and no real answers, and I don’t think anyone has an answer,” Campbell said. The General Managers were given a June date for the league’s first-ever “decentralized” Draft, which will likely be headquartered in Los Angeles, where teams made selections from their own war rooms across the continent… There was ongoing discussion about the challenge of the coach and the video review, with Campbell asking the question, “How perfect do we make the game?” That will be up to the GMs to decide.

Quotable

“It will end soon and we will go back to the old mode. (The complaints.) Why? Why did you do this to us? We got screwed last night!”

– NHL senior EVP of hockey operations Colin Campbell on the aura surrounding him at the GM Meeting, a day after being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the builder category as part of the Class of 2024.