TORONTO — Every night in the NHL’s Situation Room, record players — the heartbeat of the hockey operations staff — manually clip and code hundreds of sequences from each contest. Purple is for officiating. Yellow is for penalties and missed calls. Blue is for trainer challenges and video reviews.

And red is for injuries and player safety. Included among these clips are the dozens of taped close calls where NHL players narrowly avoid potentially devastating skating injuries.

“You wouldn’t believe how many there are,” said Colin Campbell, the NHL’s senior vice president of hockey operations. “We see it almost every night. It’s really quite scary.”

However, Campbell informed the league’s 32 general managers Tuesday at their annual meeting in November that only 55 of the 708 skaters are wearing neck protection this season.

The fact that only 7.7% of the league’s skaters chose to protect their necks seems like an incredibly low number considering we’re barely a year away from Adam Johnson’s tragic death on the ice while playing professionally for Nottingham Panthers in the UK last October.

The league has at least reported positive increases in the use of other cut-resistant protective gear, including more than 100 players now wearing undergarments with cut-resistant material around the wrist and even more wearing similar protection in pants around the ankle and in the areas of Achilles.

The NHL has gone out of its way to encourage, educate and make more cut-resistant materials available to players. There is information provided and posted in team locker rooms, along with testing data on these materials, making them league-approved.

It is the NHL Players’ Association that has pushed back against mandating a league-wide gear change based on individual player choice and comfort.

GMs were encouraged Monday to continue those conversations with players.

“Oh, we talk about it a lot,” said Montreal Canadiens general manager Kent Hughes, who previously worked as a player agent and understands the other side. “I can appreciate that the players have a choice. And I have two other boys who play hockey. They don’t exactly listen, but I wish they weren’t too proud to wear it for their own safety.”

In the year since Johnson’s unimaginable death at age 29, other leagues and levels not bound by collective bargaining agreements have stepped up to require neck guards. Just a week after it happened, the Canadian Hockey League – including the major junior leagues OHL, WHL and QMJHL – mandated neck protection. USA Hockey has followed suit for all under-18 levels as the sport’s national governing body. And then, perhaps most importantly, the AHL required all players and on-ice officials to wear neck guards before the 2024-25 season.

Campbell said the NHL’s hope is that players graduating from the AHL will already be used to the protection and won’t see the need to take it off.

“Just like the visors,” Campbell said. “And headphones before that.”

The AHL has long been a proving ground for the NHL. The AHL made visors mandatory for eye and face protection prior to the 2006–07 season; The NHL followed suit with the CBA in 2013, allowing players who played more than 25 games under the old rule to be “grandfathered” and not wear visors if that was their preference.

This season, some 12 years later, only four NHL skaters are playing without visors: Jamie Benn, Ryan O’Reilly, Zach Bogosian and Ryan Reaves.

In the meantime, the NHL is hoping more players investigate or try out the readily available cut-resistant protection, and is praying the close calls the league is chasing don’t turn out to be anything more than that. It’s almost as if the NHL should require players to watch a montage of all odds up close before the start of each season in a last-ditch plea to reconsider risk versus comfort. Regarding the potential neck protection mandate in the future, the next CBA negotiations are expected to start in early 2025.

“We’ll add it to the list,” Campbell said.

Preparing for CBA discussions

Speaking of those looming CBA negotiations, the NHL began asking general managers Tuesday for guidance as they prepare for meetings with the NHLPA.

The league essentially has GMs come up with a prioritized wish list of potential changes they’d like to see in the game.

What’s on the table? According to several NHL general managers in the room Tuesday, anything from further limiting contract length, the arbitration process, instituting a salary cap for the playoffs, reimagining the use of LTIR, the opt-out rule after the trade deadline or even the season schedule regular. format.

Yes, there seems to be an appetite for potentially limiting the length of contracts as a way to maybe even save some GMs from themselves. But this is not universal, as some are certainly happy to spread dollars over a longer period of time to reduce hitting the cap.

While, as some managers noted after the meeting, they appreciate the commissioner’s office taking their temperature and gathering feedback — they fully recognize that Gary Bettman and Bill Daly will ultimately determine what’s worth fighting with the NHLPA.

Handling reminder

NHL Assistant Commissioner Bill Daly issued a reminder to all 32 GMs on Tuesday about the league’s change rules. Daly said it’s a “refresher of what’s allowed and what’s not,” a general list of dos and don’ts.

The genesis of the recall was the slew of free-agent contracts that were agreed upon a minute after the clock struck noon on July 1 last summer, the first time teams were even legally authorized to contact UFA players and their representatives. But Daly said it wasn’t the only thing.

One CEO said the gist of Daly’s message was short and sweet: “Don’t be the one who’s stopped.” If caught, Daly recalled, the penalty is a possible substantial fine and/or loss of draft picks.

Minutes of the GM

General managers were also reminded that interviews with prospects at the Draft Combine must be kept cordial and professional, because it appears at least one team has crossed the line in pushing and grilling their prospects. .Perhaps the biggest topic of conversation has been the recent NCAA rule change with respect. to CHL player eligibility, which included a cross-section of information provided by Central Scouting chief Dan Marr as well as potential CBA ramifications from league executives. “A lot of talk about it and no real answer and I don’t think anybody has an answer,” Campbell said.. General managers have been given a date in June for the league’s first “decentralized” draft, which will likely be based in Los Angeles, with teams making selections from their own war rooms across the continent… There was ongoing discussion about the coach’s challenge and video review, with Campbell asking the question, “How perfect are we making the game?” That will be the decision of the general managers.

Quotable

“It will be over soon enough and we will be back to the old way. (The complaints.) Why? Why did you do this to us? We messed up last night!”

— Colin Campbell, NHL senior vice president of hockey operations, on the aura around him at the GM meeting, one day after being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in the constructors’ category as part of the 2024 class.