Player Numbers Will Be Added to Helmets to Help Identify NHLers at BetLM

Player Numbers Will Be Added to Helmets to Help Identify NHLers

Base­ball play­ers don’t require their ath­letes to have their num­ber on their hel­met when they step into the batter’s box. Bas­ket­ball doesn’t require play­ers to tat­too their num­ber on their fore­head; they don’t need num­bers on their head­bands either. The NFL doesn’t require their teams to put player num­bers on the front of helmets—although some teams rock the num­bers as a fash­ion state­ment (we’re look­ing at you Pitts­burgh Steel­ers and New York Foot­ball Giants). But the NHL doesn’t care about any of that noise. They’re set­ting their own trend and requir­ing NHL teams to add num­bers to the front of all play­ers’ hel­mets before the begin­ning of the reg­u­lar season.

Who says the NHL isn’t a trail­blaz­ing league?

In a series of tweets, NHL Senior Man­ager of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Schuyler Baehman explained the new, required look for all 30 teams:

“Player num­bers will be added to the front fore­head (cen­tered) loca­tion of all player hel­mets at the start of this sea­son. Front num­bers are not required to be placed on goal­tenders head­gear. Num­bers on the front and back of hel­mets will mea­sure no less than 1.25″ and no more than 2″ in height.”

Yahoo’s Puck Daddy has a pre­view of the new look.

Fol­low­ing the tweets that described the new num­bers that will be required for the begin­ning of the reg­u­lar sea­son, Baehman explained the ratio­nale for the new numbers:

“The new num­ber place­ment is designed to aid on-ice offi­cials, broad­cast­ers, et al. by pro­vid­ing an addi­tional point of player identification.”

Maybe num­bers on the top of Wayne Sim­monds hel­met would have helped offi­cials deci­pher the words that were com­ing out of his mouth?

Not all change is bad—there have been plenty of changes over the short pre­sea­son for the upcom­ing year. But what is the point of drop­ping the num­bers onto the hel­mets? Broad­cast­ers have seemed to be doing just fine fig­ur­ing out which player is which on the ice for the last fifty years and on-ice offi­cials do a pretty good job fig­ur­ing out which player belongs in the penalty box. Is there another rea­son for mak­ing the change?

In a day and age that every sin­gle poten­tial change is dis­cussed and debated, it’s inter­est­ing that this move is com­ing out only eight days before the begin­ning of the reg­u­lar sea­son. In the grand scheme of things, the new num­bers will affect equip­ment man­agers around the league than any­one else.

If noth­ing else, at least we’ll have yet new change to look for­ward to this sea­son. Now if they could just change home teams back to wear­ing white, then we might be onto something.

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