Not much progress on NHL rule changes for 2023-24

On today’s episode of Daily Faceoff Live, Frank Seravalli stopped by to talk about the GM meetings in Florida while taking a look at some potential rule changes. 

Mike McKenna: On Monday, what was discussed and can we expect any rule changes? It’s always the hot topic, but what can we expect to see on the ice next season? 

Frank Seravalli: Well, a lot of topics but not a lot of progress in terms of where the NHL and its general managers might land on any potential rule changes. One of the big things that were discussed as the GMs were broken up into four different groups of eight, was that do we need to curb the fighting after clean hits. 

Frank Seravalli: I’m going to throw a couple of numbers at you, 89 percent of the fights that occurred with players defending teammates were after clean hits, which means 11 percent of the hits were dirty. It’s often tough for players to decide that on the fly and they end up dropping the gloves anyways after a big hit. What’s interesting is that out of that 89% of fights that came from clean hits is that only 42 percent of those players ended up being penalized with the instigator penalty.

One thing they talked about on Monday was do we take the instigator penalty and enforce it more and call it more. With that comes two minutes for instigating, a five-minute major and a 10-minute misconduct. It’s pretty hefty in itself at 17 minutes, do we need to change the structure of that? Maybe make it a double minor and have it stand alone and not come with those other two automatic penalties, so we make it a five-minute major, there are lots of different ways for them to do this.  They could change the instigator rule itself, they could ask officials to enforce it more. The general managers, though, were undecided on that topic. 

One of the other things they spoke about was the idea of video review or potentially instituting a coach’s challenge for inadvertent high sticks. So, high sticks that come as a result of friendly fire or a teammate hitting another teammate in the face with a stick, which we do see often with sticks being lifted. The other thing was pucks over the glass,  that’s something that should be part of the video review element. The officials congregate and make a decision on the ice, but sometimes the camera gets a better view of it. Those were a few topics discussed.