The first decade of the NHL's Rule 48: How it completely changed the league's trajectory

The NHL logo spun around before locking into place, with a sound effect reminiscent of a cell door locking. The next image on the video was that of the new sheriff in town.

"I'm Brendan Shanahan, the National Hockey League's senior vice president of player safety ..."

Shanahan was 42 years old in 2011. He had retired from a Hall of Fame career two years earlier, taking a job with the NHL. In June 2011, he helped create the league's first Department of Player Safety. It wouldn't just hand out suspensions to players but, in a revolutionary move, would show its work through explanatory videos like this one.

"Friday night in Minnesota, an incident occurred in a game between the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Minnesota Wild ..."

As the video showed, defenseman James Wisniewski of the Blue Jackets delivered a high hit on Wild forward Cal Clutterbuck after the horn sounded to end the period in a preseason game on Sept. 24, 2011. The hit was late, intentional and from a repeat offender. But Shanahan noted something else about the hit: Wisniewski had violated Rule 48.1 for an illegal check to the head, a recently added regulation.

Wisniewski was suspended for 12 games. The rest of the league was on notice. Targeting the head-on checks would no longer be tolerated.

"If you're a great player with great timing, you could still deliver great hits. But targeting the head was something that people wanted out of the game," Shanahan told ESPN recently, 10 seasons after the Department of Player Safety's debut.

"It was a hard job and it was thankless. As much as we were getting criticized, we tried to always remember that we were going to make the game safer and make it better."

Rule 48 still had that fresh-rule smell in 2011. Shanahan's suspension video was one of the first the department created. It was the first time he used phrases such as "the head is targeted," "principal point of contact" and "prior history of discipline."

It would not be the last.

From 2011-12 through 2020-21, there were 80 suspensions for hits that violated Rule 48 in the preseason, regular season and playoffs. It's the rule on which the Department of Player Safety was built. It's a rule that was created in an effort to reduce the number of concussions in the league, and one that fundamentally changed the way the game was played in the NHL over the past decade.

"What was borderline before that has become clear that it's not acceptable in the game. I think the respect factor has grown," Tampa Bay Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said. "We've seen some of the harsher suspensions put in place. I don't think there's as much of a gray area for players. We know there are punishments."

Here's the story on how the rule came to be, what its impact has been in its first 10 seasons and what comes next.

The impact

George Parros, the current head of the Department of Player Safety, was a winger with the Anaheim Ducks when Rule 48 was introduced. He doesn't remember it affecting the way he played.

"The only thing I remember was the video that Shanahan and [NHLPA executive] Mathieu Schneider put out and we had to watch it in the locker room. It was kind of funny, to be honest. They were both pretty stiff," he said.

Parros has led the department since September 2017. In 2017-18, the NHL had only one suspension for an illegal check to the head in the regular season, the lowest total in seven years.

"I feel we've fine-tuned the game to a great degree," Parros said. "A lot of the hits we see are because the game is so fast. Every once in a while, we see something with some intention behind it, but very rarely."

The number of suspensions has fluctuated since then. It jumped back up to eight regular-season bans in 2018-19, and 12 in total. The biggest season for illegal check to the head suspensions was 2013-14, with 15 in total. The lowest total was four in 2019-20, a season shortened by the COVID pandemic whose playoffs were held inside spectator-free bubbles.

According to Icy Data, which tracks NHL penalties by type, the Ottawa Senators had the most minor penalties for checks to the head from 2010 to '20 with 34, followed by the Boston Bruins (33) and the Lightning (26).

"We watch over a thousand clips a year in our department. About 150 of those would involve head contact," Parros said. "If we suspend five or six times a year for an illegal check to the head ... you can imagine how many were fine, and how many were in that gray area of what we're trying to define here."

Rule 48 has been the basis for several of the NHL's most significant suspensions, including:

• Oct. 10, 2013: Buffalo Sabres winger Patrick Kaleta was suspended 10 games for a hit to the head of Jack Johnson.

• Oct. 3, 2015: San Jose Sharks winger Raffi Torres was suspended 41 games for an illegal check to the head of Jakob Silfverberg.

• Sept. 30, 2018: Washington Capitals forward Tom Wilson was suspended for 20 games, reduced to 14 games on appeal, for an illegal check to the head of Oskar Sundqvist.

Rule 48 has impacted how penalties are enforced, how suspensions are handed out and how players deliver body checks. Shanahan believes it may have even opened up the game offensively.

"When I watch games now, I see players cutting across the high slot and taking shots on goal, and you don't see players zeroing in to hit them," he said. "It's not necessarily about the rule. It's because the players wanted that hit out of the game."

But Stamkos disagreed that enforcement of illegal hits to the head led to braver players in the slot.

 "I don't think that it's affected guys taking ice in the middle," he said. "You never think about a guy elbowing you in the head. It just happens."

There was a time when that would happen with no recourse from the NHL. For decades, hits that targeted the head would end up on VHS highlight tapes rather than in a hearing room. A ban on hits to the head seemed like an improbable suggestion.

"There were probably many reasons for that," Parros said. "But there are two that I consider most significant: First, our awareness and understanding of the effects of concussions was really accelerating at that time -- similar to other sports' -- to such an extent that it adjusted the thinking about such hits in a game, in which the puck-carrier normally is bent forward, somewhat leading with his head.

"Second, any such ban would have been a major change, since all of the people in the NHL at that point had been raised and taught how to hit a certain way. They'd be required to change on a dime, into thinking that what they were doing for 25 years is now illegal."

Despite those challenges, a movement to ban checks to the head picked up momentum at the end of 2009.

As one NHL source put it: "The David Booth one was so, so horrifying that it really stopped everyone in their tracks."

The David Booth hit

There are two hits from the 2009-10 season that paved the way to Rule 48. In both cases, the hockey world wanted massive suspensions that the NHL felt its rulebook didn't support.

The first was delivered on Oct. 24, 2009. The Philadelphia Flyers were hosting the Florida Panthers. David Booth, the Panthers' leading goal scorer in the previous season, was carrying a puck through the Flyers' offensive zone. Mike Richards of the Flyers cut across on a backcheck and delivered a hit to Booth's head. The Panthers forward fell, banging his head on the ice before falling limp. A stretcher was quickly wheeled out onto the rink.

Booth doesn't remember the hit, nor does he remember his time in the hospital. The recollection seared into his memory is that of waking up in the ambulance that took him from the arena and feeling an overwhelming rush of panic. He didn't know where he was. His legs and chest were strapped down. He grabbed his team trainer by the collar of his shirt, screaming to get him out of there.

"It was like I was possessed. I was trying to break the seat belts," Booth told ESPN recently.

He has seen the hit since then, more than a few times. People will cue it up on their phones, play it for him and ask, macabrely, "This you?"

Richards was given a five-minute major for interference and a game misconduct by the on-ice officials. Booth was released from the hospital after one day. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that he "suffered a concussion but no other serious injuries."

Booth would play six more seasons in the NHL and nine more professionally. But he was never the same after the hit, by his own admission. There were cognitive issues. There was also a nagging hesitancy in his game that never really left due to the devastating nature of the hit.

"It's human nature to feel like the victim. That something happened that I didn't deserve to have happen. I think that's the easy way out, to say it's Mike's fault or the league's fault," Booth said. "That's something I want to stay away from. It happened, and it's unfortunate and it changed the course of my career."

The incident also changed the conversation in the NHL. There was outrage from the hockey world, seeking supplemental disciplinary justice against Richards. But the hockey operations department, under Colin Campbell, determined that the hit wasn't punishable under the current rules. For the first time, there was real momentum for a rule change at the November 2009 NHL general managers meetings, which took place soon after the Richards hit.

There had been some conversation about a crackdown on checks to the head through the years. But in many cases, there was nothing on the books that outlawed head contact, so the hits went without supplemental discipline. There were also general managers who would support more penalties for hits to the head. Jim Rutherford, the longtime GM for the Carolina Hurricanes and Pittsburgh Penguins, was an advocate for a total ban on head contact.

What had fundamentally changed about the game, as was evident from the Richards hit, was that defensive players were backchecking harder than they ever had before. 

"Back pressure? You never heard of that before," recalled Ray Shero, who was general manager of the Penguins when the head-shot conversations started. "It was obviously becoming a part of the game, and there wasn't a lot of time and space [to avoid hits]."

Shero was an advocate for making checks to an opponent's head illegal.

"I never liked those sorts of hits. It's part not of the game," he said.

Ironically, Rule 48 might not have happened without one of his players delivering that sort of hit.

The Marc Savard hit

On March 7, 2010, the Boston Bruins were visiting the Penguins in Pittsburgh. In the third period, Boston center Marc Savard collected a pass high in the Penguins zone and fired a quick shot toward the Pittsburgh net. With Savard in a vulnerable position after releasing the puck, Penguins winger Matt Cooke skated by and used his left arm to drill Savard in the head. The Bruins forward twisted to the ice, eerily near the location on the ice where Booth was injured months earlier in Philadelphia. Cooke wasn't penalized on the play.

Another hit to the head. Another player stretchered off the ice. Another controversy right before the general managers met again.

"Maybe it's a good thing that the GM meetings are when they are," Cooke's teammate, Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, said in the aftermath of the hit. "There's obviously some confusion as to what's a good hit and what's not a good hit. That's got to be fixed pretty quickly. We've seen it time and time again, and we all debate whether it was a good or a bad hit."

Shero's plan was to fly to the GM meetings after the Penguins game. Bruins GM Peter Chiarelli was sharing a flight with him to Florida for the conference.

"That was a long ride to the Pittsburgh airport. I think it was 15 minutes before we said anything to each other," Shero said.

The next morning, there was a long discussion among the GMs about the Cooke hit and whether there was a remedy for it through supplemental discipline. There was a clamor for Cooke to be suspended, from fans, media and players alike. 

"The media was talking, and we were talking internally," said Edmonton Oilers GM Ken Holland, who was then the general manager of the Detroit Red Wings. "You could make the case that it was legal. But all the managers went to that meeting knowing that, because of that hit, we had to make some adjustments to the way the game was being officiated. To make a safer environment, and to protect our players."

The debate was intense. Lou Lamoriello, then GM of the New Jersey Devils, said that suspending Cooke would be akin to "making something up" because there was no rule covering that hit.

"It was like 'The Untouchables' and Al Capone. What, were they going to get Matt Cooke on tax evasion?" recalled Shero, now an advisor to the Minnesota Wild. "There was nothing in the rulebook. There was nothing to have a hearing on."

By not taking action against Cooke, Campbell forced action from the general managers to finally, and formally, create a rule that could cover hits like those that injured Booth and Savard. Several people involved in those meetings agreed that if Campbell suspended Cooke -- which would have been thoroughly popular at the time -- it would have been years before a rule that actually covered the incident would have been enacted.

"There is no Rule 48 if he just does what a lot of the people in hockey and media wanted done at the time, which was to just suspend him despite the rulebook," Shanahan said. "If he suspends Matt Cooke for that hit, then it's quieter. It goes away. You don't have this moment where the managers are wondering what they want to do to make the game better."

What the GMs decided to do was implement a rare in-season rule change. "Beginning with tonight's games, the NHL will implement a new rule prohibiting a lateral back pressure or blindside hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principal point of contact," the league announced on March 25, 2010.

The announcement  also stated that the hockey operations department was empowered to review any such hit for the purpose of supplemental discipline -- a decision that was popular with the players at the time, in the aftermath of hits like the one delivered to Booth. 

Shanahan replaced Campbell as the head of player safety on June 1, 2011. But before that, he helped refine Rule 48.

The tweaking

Rule 48 formally appeared in the NHL rulebook for the 2010-11 season. Illegal checks to the head were now defined: "A lateral or blindside hit to an opponent where the head is targeted and/or the principal point of contact is not permitted." 

The biggest news in the rule's first iteration was that checks to the head would be subject to a five-minute major penalty and automatic game misconduct, with possible supplemental discipline from the league.

NHL commissioner Gary Bettman called the rule change "a fundamental shift" for the league, but cautioned not to have it apply to all situations.

"There are nuanced differences between acts that some people think are similar, but they're not the same. So you can't be too willing or too quick to paint what happens on the ice that requires supplemental discipline with too broad a brush," he said.

The first season of the rule saw six players get suspended specifically for hits to the head: Shane Doan (three games), Joe Thornton (two games), Matt Martin (two games), Tom Kostopoulos (six games), Mike Brown (three games) and Daniel Paille (four games). There were also a handful of fines. The rest of the suspensions involving head contact were categorized as being for elbowing, cross-checking, charging or the lateness of a hit.

The league quickly discovered that referees who had asked for Rule 48 to be implemented were hesitant to enforce it.

"The referees at the time were saying that on the ice in real time it was a difficult call to make. That they would catch more of them if it was a minor penalty, that with a major, because it was a new rule, it was too punitive. They felt the harsher penalty could be through supplemental discipline," Shanahan said.