Cox: Will Chara hit still outrage hockey fans in a month?

If you haven't seen this article it's worth a look.

By Damien Cox Sports Columnist --- If you’re the NHL, why change when you know that all it takes to turn today’s outraged consumer into tomorrow’s satisfied fan is seeing his team’s enforcer win a fight?

That said, there is a sense that even hardcore hockey fans have had enough of the head shots and don’t like that Sidney Crosby is sitting out with a concussion so serious that his career may be threatened.

The GMs felt they made a significant move last year, enacting Rule 48 to try and take blindside headshots out of the game. It may have done specifically what it intended (no more Matt Cooke hits on Marc Savard to go unpunished) but hasn’t quieted the overall drumbeat, that hockey has become too dangerous and too destructive, even to its elite players.

So the challenge facing the GMs and the league is to be seen as responding to the problem without doing so in a knee-jerk manner. The GMs are paid not to be fans; they’re there to think carefully and dispassionately about change, looking beyond the needs of just their team and just their players.

Of course, it’s that latter point that always trips up the hockey executives. They always want the other guy suspended, while claiming their players would never intentionally hurt a fly.

So don’t look for big news out of Boca Raton this week. What you can hope for is a few good ideas, and possibly the emergence of a new philosophy, one that puts more emphasis on protecting the rights of victims of hockey violence, as opposed to keeping brutes and cheap-shot artists in the league.

It’s time that the perpetrators of on-ice crimes — not just the victims — are the ones who see their careers come to an end.

But even that may not happen. And then, inevitably, people will forget