Icing for Devil's Cake

Maybe you haven't heard about the Wild's Foster suffering a broken leg while racing to touch the puck on an icing call against the Sharks' fellow rookie Mitchell. Surely though, you've heard Don Cherry go on and on for ages about why touch icing should be abolished from the league.

Touch icing has injured player after player, and the senseless losses must be stopped. Sure, touch icing keeps the game exciting, giving for a frantic rush down the ice, and the chance for a team to release the puck from deep in its own zone, enabling some great plays and excitement over the years.

But for all the excitement, having to spend an eternity carefully taking a promising rookie like Foster off the ice just kills the game. The memory of the incident, along with the physical damage of it, will undoubtedly change Foster's game for a while, if not for a long time.

Touch icing is just too high a price to pay for that thrill, so why not see if the risk can be lowered? Instead of forcing the two players to rush all the way to the puck, crashing the boards and each other, why not change up the situation? Changing to no-touch icing could make the defensive zone a near-inescapable zone for teams struggling to move into attack mode, but we can have the best of both worlds.

Why not propose some solutions? Instead of having to touch the puck, why not change the rules so that if the puck is passed into a team's zone from beyond centre ice, that team must cross into the zone first? This could still allow for some nice puck-tosses from deep in your own zone, and for a player to break out and slip first into the zone, and then get good scoring chances. It would also give some motivation for the defender to ease off. Once the attacker crosses into the zone first, the defender doesn't have the motivation of getting a faceoff at the other end of the ice, and could instead focus on how best to defend the attacker, or hold off any assistance.

There has to be a way out there to stop the deadly board-crashing that has hurt so many over the years, while keeping the excitement alive. I won't ever propose bigger nets, but I think this is a change that has been waiting far too long to be looked into, and taken far too high a toll in the meantime.