Recap of GM Meetings

As you know, the National Hockey League held their annual General Managers Meeting (super-secret no-girls-allowed meet-up) in Boca Raton, Florida this week.

Must be nice to go to Florida and just chillax, boys.

For some reason, we just imagine them all like chit-chatting and sitting around gossiping about their players and having a grand old time while drinking mimosas at the pool.

"OMG there is no way that Kenny would do that!
"Did you see how drunk Lombo was last night? Must be an LA thing."
"Have you heard the latest about Burkie?"


Unfortunately for us, that's just in our fantasies.

But the GMs were really hard at work, discussing things like player safety and hybrid icing and Alex Radulov.

What? Radulov? Haven't heard that name in a while, huh? Yeah, apparently Nashville is getting ready to bring him back to America. We wonder if it involves smuggling him into the country via a Russian mail-order bride service.

Okay, onto other things.

Here is EJ Hradek and Dan Rosen's sum-up of the 'meeting of the minds' if you want to know in a hurry what happened.



Other news on these meetings:

- Hybrid icing was the biggest thing to come out of the meetings in Florida. Hybrid icing is basically when the linesman makes the call whether the forechecker or the defenseman is closer to the puck and that will let him know whether it's icing or not.

We like this idea only because injuries for icing call races are ridiculous and easily preventable. Yeah they don't happen that often but when they do, they're unnecessary and brutal.

There were quite a few GMs who were in favor of this and spoke about it.

But we chose Tallon's interview because of reasons.


- The General Managers also discussed Brendan Shanahan and the job that he is doing as czar of player safety. Most were happy with his job so far and we couldn't agree more.

It's a tough job and someone's got to do it. Fans will never be 100% satisfied with every call but like we said, someone's got to do it.

We think one of the best things Shanahan did was bring in the video explanations for the suspension/non-suspension calls. It really does take a lot of the speculation out of calls and explains to the fans (and players/GMs/coaches) why the the play was suspendable or not.


- They also honored Pat Quinn at dinner on one of the nights.

Classy, boys. Good move.


- They also discussed the head hits and the stricter rules that are being placed on those kinds of hits.

There are so many more new protocols that the teams have to follow regarding concussions that it may seem like more players are getting them but in reality, they're just being diagnosed correctly this time.

The number of concussions is similar to the numbers last season so that is a good sign. The game is still physical and there are still hits but at least the number of concussions diagnosed have leveled out.


- Kerry Fraser talks about the proposed rule changes and how that will affect the game and the officials.


- EJ Hradek and Dan Rosen discuss the possible return to the NHL for Alex Radulov.



- And this is important...Ray Shero got some sun.

We knew he was chatting poolside. That's where we would be, margaritas in hand.