Hit on Canadiens' Slafkovsky rekindles debate over rules on head contact

CORAL SPRINGS, Fla.— There stood Juraj Slafkovsky, with tongue planted firmly in cheek while he was being asked how his head felt a day after being on the receiving end of a hit that knocked him out of Thursday’s game against the Carolina Hurricanes.

“Feeling good,” said the Montreal Canadiens winger after Friday’s 45-minute practice in Florida. “The ref said I got hit in the chest, so I was ready to (practise), I guess.”

Slafkovsky said the league-appointed concussion spotter at Thursday’s game obviously saw something different, hence his removal with 5:23 to go while the Canadiens were trailing the Hurricanes by a goal.

The big Slovak didn’t feel there was much justice in having to run through concussion protocol while Stefan Noesen—who connected directly with his head on the play that left him facedown on the ice for what he estimated was six seconds—could jump back on the ice freely without spending at least two minutes in the penalty box first, and he wasn’t alone.

Canadiens fans absolutely hated it.

Slafkovsky’s teammates didn’t exactly love it, either.

But while a lot of the fans would lobby to change the rule that still makes such hits permissible in the NHL, you won’t find too many players and coaches lobbying for that to happen.

So long as that’s the case, it isn’t going to change.

As Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher said on Thursday, “I think we have gone in the right direction. You look at some of the hits that were taking place 10, 15 years ago, those are out of the game, and that’s a good thing. But you don’t want to push it too far because the physicality in our sport is something that players love, fans love, and it has a huge impact on who wins. It’s a skillset, so it’s one of those things you can’t eliminate.”

Ask 10 NHL players if the league should adopt the International Ice Hockey Federation’s rule to penalize any play that involves head contact and you’d struggle to find one who says it should. If posts on ‘X’ are truly representative of the wider world, that sentiment doesn’t appear to be shared by the majority of the hockey-viewing population.

And yet, Canadiens fans up in arms about Noesen’s hit on Slafkovsky didn’t appear to be protesting when Canadiens defenceman Mike Matheson made contact with former Canadien Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s head on a hit a period earlier.

In their view, in the league’s view and in his own view, Matheson made a legal check.

We didn’t ask him specifically about it, but when we asked him how he’d feel about instituting a rule that would make that hit—and any other involving head contact—illegal, he made it clear that’s how he felt.

“I think that’s tough to say,” said Matheson. “There’s definitely scenarios where there’s head contact that starts with the chest or the shoulder and then kind of rises up.”

That’s what happened on his hit on Kotkaniemi.

There are also hits where a player hits another player directly in the head but only does so as a result of the path he’s on and the position the receiving player puts himself in. As was the case with Noesen and Slafkovsky.

Noesen didn’t suddenly alter course to hit Slafkovsky in the head, nor did he make any abrupt motion with his arm to specifically “pick” it to qualify the hit as illegal under Rule 48 of the NHL rulebook.

There are other factors that had the officials decide in real time the hit should not be penalized.

“Sometimes guys are off balance, sometimes guys lean forward to make a play at the last second,” said Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis. “So, there’s a little bit of grey area (that allows the officials to decide).”

He was one of several members of the team to suggest the officials should be given a chance to look again before deciding.

Josh Anderson said it Thursday night, and St. Louis, Gallagher and Matheson all echoed it Friday.

“Looking at that hit, I feel like everyone’s reaction was probably seeing Slaf on the ground and going like, ‘Whoa, what happened there?’ And the refs don’t have that liberty of being like, ‘Whoa, what happened? Let’s go look at the replay,’ whereas everyone then looks at the replay and says, ‘How can you not call that?’,” said Matheson. “So, I think it’d be great for them to have the discussion of just reviewing. Not necessarily saying every hit that has head contact needs to be a penalty, but just be able to review it so they could have the same luxury as everybody else.”

He and his teammates would’ve probably been disappointed to see the officials review Noesen’s hit and stand by their decision to not make it a penalty, but their gripe would be with the rule.

Canadiens forward Jake Evans admitted he wasn’t entirely sure what it said or how it’s specifically written, so he couldn’t comment on the legality of the hit. But he wisely pointed out the officials might have had no choice but to have called a penalty had Slafkovsky been rendered bloodied and knocked unconscious on the play instead of just off his feet.

He was bringing up another element of grey no one in the game appears to be campaigning to eliminate. Least of all, his peers.

They have the power to change it.

“Anything that happens, the players have input. Nothing happens without the voice of the players,” said Gallagher. “But it’s tough in our sport to make it black and white. There’s always going to be little grey areas. Look at football; football has really tried to eliminate the head contact and a lot of people are complaining they’ve gone too far to protect the quarterbacks. So, it goes both ways.

“Safety of the players comes first, but you don’t want to lose what makes hockey special and physicality’s a part of that. So, it’s just about finding the line of how you protect the players. Head contact is a serious issue, and that’s something that we’ll always try to improve without affecting the integrity of the sport.”

We can all concede we’ve seen progress—that the institution of Rule 48 back in 2010 has eliminated most of the targeted headshots in the game and made penalizing and suspending ones that still happen here and there possible.

But if we want to see more progress, if we want to see fewer angry players and fans following hits involving head contact, new rules must be instituted.

The ones pertaining to head contact in international competition don’t appear to have negatively affected the integrity of the game, either. And though Gallagher didn’t lobby for their adoption in the NHL, he made the strongest point about how we may eventually get to a point in time where hits like the one on Slafkovsky become far less debatable, enraging and controversial.

“It would definitely take some getting used to,” he said. “(But the IIHF) made it where it’s black and white. They have a standard, and that’s their standard. And if we were to go to that, it would just take some time. I think players would adjust. It’s just like any rule.”