Below is the discussion starting again in the NHL. It sound funny to me... Should we ban head hits? Duh. But with regard to youth ice hockey, I would say to increase penalties for contacting the players neck, head, or back. Instituting mandatory 5 minute majors for this type of contact is the only way to get youth players to change the behavior. In additon to the 5 minutes, a 10 minute misconduct shall be assessed. Do it 2x's in a a game and your out of the game. Penalties must effect the player and team for this type of reckless play to end or be decreased to the lowest possible levels. No hits to the head, neck, or back. This is really a no-brainer.
Here is the article pasted from Yahoo.
This was the best player in the game, on pace for the best season of his career, concussed in the league’s showcase event. People inside and outside of the game have held up Crosby’s absence as the high cost of concussions and used it to argue for a ban on all hits to the head, whether intentional or unintentional.
"My position is there should be no head hits,” Penguins general manager Ray Shero said. “That’s the position of the Penguins, and that’s mine, and I brought it up today in our group.”
But the league has tried to take the emotion out of the equation and look at the cold, hard data. The hockey operations department studied all of the concussions suffered through March 1 and compared them to the same period last season, before Rule 48 was instituted to ban blindside hits to the head. Hockey ops showed the GMs video clips of virtually every concussion in the NHL this season and gave them statistics.
Crosby thought Steckel hit him intentionally. The league considered it incidental contact. Twenty-six percent of concussions though March 1 were from what the league labeled “accidental events” – teammates running into each other, players tripping on their own, pucks hitting players, inadvertent collisions of opponents. The number of accidental concussions doubled.
Asked after his skate Monday morning whether head shots should be banned, Crosby told reporters in Pittsburgh: “That’s a great question. I’d like to say yes. But it’s more than just saying that. There’s obviously got to be some clarity. Everything’s got to be looked at. It’s a pretty fast game. There may be times when guys maybe don’t (aim) for the head but come into contact with the head. What do you do in that situation?”
Crosby said banning deliberate head shots would take nothing from the game. Fourteen percent of all concussions through March 1 resulted from legal hits to the head. If you could cut that 14 percent, wouldn’t you do it? But Bettman called the legal hits to the head that some want outlawed “a small piece of the equation.” He said the data clearly show that no one thing caused concussions in the period studied and the actual reasons for the increase in the injury differ from the speculation
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