Competition Committee Recommends Two Rule Changes

The NHL’s Competition Committee met this weekend to discuss possible rule changes for the upcoming season, among them cracking down on slashes and off-side reviews. With a release today (h/t Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet) they’ve made recommendations on two different rules:

Rule 87 Time-outs: The Committee recommends a change so that no time-out shall be granted following an icing for the team that committed the icing infraction.

Rule 80.4: The Committee recommends a change so that when a team has a power-play and a player on the team at full strength causes a stoppage of play as the result of striking the puck with a high stick in the offensive zone, the resulting face-off shall be made in the neutral zone on the nearest face-off spot. This makes the rule consistent with how the face-off is addressed when there is a stoppage under the same circumstances when both teams are at full strength.

The Committee reviewed and discussed many aspects of the rules and how the game is played and was satisfied that no additional changes would be necessary or appropriate at this time.

These rules would have to be approved by the Board of Governors in order to be instituted, but since neither pose a drastic change to the game it would be unlikely for them to be turned down. This doesn’t mean that other rule changes will not go into effect for the 2017-18 season, but that the committee themselves felt nothing else was necessary at this time.

The icing rule in particular is an interesting one, as timeouts are used frequently in this situation at the moment. After a prolonged shift in their own zone that ends with a defender firing the puck down the ice, a coach will take his timeout to give them a brief period of respite since they cannot be substituted. The high-stick rule is one that will come into effect rarely, and is one that most fans and players likely didn’t even know was the case in the first place.