By Allan Muir

Here’s the problem with leaving your playoff fate in the hands of another team: Anything can happen.

Usually that means the other team that’s battling you for a spot draws on its own desperation to win and knock you out. Or the team they’re playing might not be fully inspired to carry your flag.

And sometimes the game can be taken out of their hands completely.

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Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke wants to bring back the bear hug to help prevent serious boarding injuries. (Jean Levac/ZUMApress)

By Stu Hackel

The NHL’s second Research, Development and Orientation Camp opens today in Etobicoke, Ontario with a group of the best draft eligible junior players (here’s the list) testing more than 30 potential new rules under game conditions while simultaneously showing their stuff to scouts.

Once upon a time, rule tests were staged during the NHL preseason, or for a year in the AHL, before the NHL would adopt them. Now, they do it this way. The camp provides NHL GMs with a chance to see them as a group and discuss what they’ve just seen. One wise commenter noted that if the GMs wanted to see how removing the trapezoid behind the net would work, they didn’t need the RDO Camp; all they needed to do was watch any NHL game film prior to 2005.

We wrote about some of these proposed rules last month. While a few have a real shot at being adopted, some are just pet ideas of a single GM who wants to convince his colleagues of the rule’s value. Toronto’s Brian Burke, for example, has never been a fan of the 2005 rule changes that sped up the game, and he has pushed his notion of the “bear hug” rule in which a player can wrap his arms around an opponent and take him into the boards. That would essentially legalize holding and re-introduce clutching and grabbing along the boards. Ostensibly, this is a safety measure in response to the numerous dangerous boarding incidents that have taken place over the last few years. But it seems like an unnecessary suggestion considering the NHL has strengthened Rule 41 on boarding this summer.

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By Stu Hackel

The NHL’s video review procedures have taken a few hits this season and the latest will sting a bit as it may have sealed the end of the Flames’ playoff hopes. They’re not happy about it in Calgary, and with postseason spots at stake and each goal meaning so much, the seemingly annual grousing about the review system has arrived.

But in this case, the system functioned exactly as it should, even if it appears to some that it failed and the league got the call wrong.
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