Headshots

   I know, tons of people have stated what they think about headshots and how they can be stopped.  They are illegal, they are dirty, they are disrespectful, and more than anything, they are painful.  And that we can tell you from our years of playing hockey.  They need to stop, players need to injured much less.  But how?

Marc Savard after being victim to a dirty headshot.

   Our opinion on these hits, are that it is completely the individual who is making the check to make sure it is clean, and in no way injures the other player.  This is hard to do, of course there will be coincidental injuries where the player gets hit oddly, and jams a wrist, or pops out a shoulder.  But with every headshot made, the player giving the hit knows exactly what he is doing.  He knows how he can prevent himself from hurting an individual, but still he delivers a huge hit to the head.

   So really, how are they to stop?  Some opinions have been get better helmets to prevent concussions, some have been saying longer suspensions for these hits, some even saying players should have their own career ended, being thrown out of the NHL.  Getting better helmets will not help, unless players want to be carrying 10 pounds of padding around on their head and even then there could still be concussions.  Longer suspensions still leaves other players making the same hits, and when the accused player is unsuspended, he goes and does the same thing not too much later.  Being thrown out of the NHL is completely unnecessary.  These players in the NHL are all very talented, and deserve to be there, but with this behavior, maybe they should be kicked out.

   We cannot say that our opinion is correct, but for sure we can say that this issue needs to be solved.  So our theory is that it is up to the players to make headshots stop happening.  They know what they are doing when they hit, and there is nothing else we can do.
   Hockey is great, but it does have its major issues, and this is one of them.  Us as fans, we cannot do anything about it, it is up to the players, and other people are trying too hard to fix something that for them, is not fixable.