Head hits in the news (again)

Head hits in the news (again) – From The Rink:

“The league should at least stop saying it’s concerned with hits to the head, because it’s not,” Hurricanes GM Jim Rutherford told TSN.ca. “I’ve had four players — Erik Cole, Trevor Letowski, Matt Cullen and now Brandon Sutter — get badly injured on hits to the head and only one of the guys who hit them was suspended. So don’t tell me the league is concerned about hits to the head because it’s not.”

It’s good to see this issue getting some much-needed publicity, especially from one of the league’s GMs. Of course, outcries like this would be much more effective if they didn’t come immediately after one of the team’s own players was hurt.

So what do we do? Outlaw ANY hit to the head?

I’m sorry to see Sutter hurt (he’s now out of the hospital), but… Who’s responsibility is it to avoid a hit? If you watch the reply (embedded above), Doug Weight is skating with one foot on the center line. Sutter comes into the camera view with his skates about 2 feet from the blue line. Weight doesn’t change his line.

Neither does Sutter. Weight hits him straight on. Clean hit, if you ignore the head part.

Sutter had 20+ feet of ice, with a clear view, to see Weight, recognize the hit coming, and either avoid the hit or get ready for it. He did neither.

So who’s responsible here? Should Weight be responsible for making sure he doesn’t hit Sutter? One could argue that Sutter shifted his position after Weight committed to the hit, moving his head into the hitting zone, but that’s all really subjective.

What isn’t subjective is that Sutter had multiple seconds and 20′ of ice to see Weight coming and do something — and he didn’t. Weight, I think, has a responsibility to try to avoid hitting him in the head, but did he really have the opportunity?

Quotes I read from Colin Campbell and the war room all indicate everyone in league office agreed it was a clean hit, and I agree as well. I don’t see that Weight did anything wrong here; in fact, I’ll go so far as to say that Weight probably has an expectation that Sutter is going to try to evade him at some point, and was as surprised as anyone when Sutter didn’t see him and didn’t try to move off the hit.

Sutter had his head down. Neither player was in traffic, neither player’s view was obstructed, and frankly, I think ultimately it’s the player BEING HIT that has the responsibility to avoid the hit, not the hitting player’s responsibility to pull the hit. If you don’t keep your head on a swivel, someone is going to line you up and hit you into next week.

Sutter’s somewhere in next week right now.

Sorry, that’s hockey.

We can argue whether or not any hit to a head under any circumstance should be a penalty at any time — and honestly, I could buy into that — but I think this one’s Sutter’s fault, the same way the classic hit on Lindros by Scott Steven’s was Lindros’ fault. And honestly, if you change the rule so that any hit to the head causes a penalty, well, heads will be safer, but we’ll shortly be complaining about how many penalties the referees are calling (again).

Hockey’s a physical game. Players have to be aware of what’s going on around them. Sutter wasn’t. That is, to me, the base problem here: If Sutter had been watching what was going on, Weight never would have gotten a hit on him. It was completely avoidable.

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