Mark Spector

Mark Spector is a columnist for sportsnet.ca

Hitting in hockey is headed for a change but how we get there is the question.

"The hits are great. Until someone gets hurt." - Colin Campbell, the NHL's Director of Hockey Operations.

BOCA RATON Fla. - This is Canadian hockey's culture change. This is where we look at what separates our game from everybody else's game, and decide that perhaps it has gone too far.

It is about Matt Cooke, a third-line plugger from Belleville whose very job is to lay a hard, clean lick on Marc Savard, saying to himself, "No, I'm going to lay off this hit. This one is too dangerous."

It's about his coach, Dan Bylsma - and all the other coaches who preach "Finish your check!" to players like Cooke before each and every game - coming to grips with the fact that his third-liner is going to pass on a wide-open shot at the opponent's best player once in a while in the name of safety.

If that decision costs Cooke his job, then nothing changes.

And at the most basic level, it is about Canadians letting go of one of the tenets of our sport - the four cautionary words that have become a metaphor for the kind of game that makes our brand of hockey the best and most violent in the world:

"Keep your head up."

That, admits Colin Campbell, is the key question that is becoming more and more visible as the league boils down the concussion issue. "Do we shift the responsibility to the player delivering the hit now?"

It's a fair and complex question, because as long as the hit was clean, a Canadian has always shrugged his shoulders and fallen back on our slogan. "Guess he should have kept his head up."

Are we ready to say, "Guess he should have let that guy of the hook."

This isn't downsizing goaltending equipment. I always thought that elongated process was a boondoggle that should have been taken care of in 12 months, not 12 years.

This is a complete change in a belief system that Canadians have always held. The argument we make when Mike Richards takes David Booth apart at mid-ice, his elbow tucked tight to his side, both feet on the ice and the puck right there in the TV frame.

"Well," we always say, "it was a clean check."

Dr. Willem Meeuwisse, a concussion expert from Calgary has been studying concussions in hockey for years, and has found very little in the way of trends. He and his colleagues have charted 200 concussions over the past two-and-a-half NHL seasons, with little pattern.

"They happen in all different places (on the ice), in all different ways," he said Monday at the general managers' meetings in Boca Raton. "They happen in the offensive zone, the neutral zone, the defensive zone. All different mechanisms of contact."

So the NHL has traditionally started with what they can control. They've ticked off plenty of offences prior to tackling this one.

The GMs were shown stick-swinging incidents from the '50s and '60s on Monday, acts that have been successfully stripped from the game. The league has also gained control over wild elbows that cause concussions, and a punch to the head that was acceptable in the '70s is now a suspendable offence. We're all OK with that.

All those acts are rulebook offences however. A clean bodycheck, elbow tucked tight to your side and both feet on the ground, is exactly that: a clean bodycheck.

So the questions becomes, as Colin Campbell asked Monday, "Do you want to take shoulders to the head out of hockey."

Well, only sometimes. As Meeuwisse points out, "Concussions are not always because of dirty play."

Maybe now a clean hit isn't clean anymore, if it catches a head. Good luck being Zdeno Chara, or the 6-foot-8 Tyler Myers in Buffalo.

The more you learn about this subject, the more difficult it becomes to nail down.

What happens if you eliminate all checks on players who have their heads down? Well, since the league instituted hitting-from-behind penalties, defencemen have taken on the dangerous trait of playing with their back to the ice. No one thought that would happen as a result of a seemingly prudent rule, but it did.

If you penalize hits on players who have their heads down, will the same thing occur?

"We're very genuine about this," Boston GM Pete Chiarelli said. "It's the balance between physicality and hits to the head."

This is the rare instance where fans, players, GMs and coaches all want the same result - to rid the game of hits like the one Matt Cooke threw Sunday night.

They'll get there. It's just that no one is quite sure how, that's all.

Or what our game will look like three years after they do.