Hybrid icing asks a linesman to guess a race

The rule replaced a dangerous collision with a judgement call nobody can make consistently at full speed.

Two players leave from roughly the same place at roughly the same time, cover about sixty feet, and an official standing near the boards has to decide which of them would have reached a dot first if the race had been allowed to finish.

That is hybrid icing. It is a good rule. It is also a strange one, and the strangeness gets waved away because the alternative was worse.

Touch icing produced the injuries everyone remembers: a defenceman skating full speed at his own end wall with a forechecker on his hip, both of them arriving at the same board at the same moment, one of them going in awkwardly. Careers ended that way. Something had to change, and the automatic icing used elsewhere was rejected because it kills the race entirely and with it a genuinely exciting play.

So the compromise puts the decision at the faceoff dots. Whoever is judged to be winning at that line gets the call. And now think about what the official is actually doing. He is comparing two skaters who may be side by side, who may be at different stages of their stride, one of whom is going backwards, while the puck is still travelling and while he must also watch for interference in the race. He makes the decision in a fraction of a second and it is not reviewable.

The consequences of a coin flip are not small. Icing called means a defensive zone draw with no line change for the team that iced it, which is the whole reason the rule bites. Waved off means a live puck deep in the zone with a forechecker on it. Same race, opposite outcomes, decided by an angle of vision.

There is a second-order effect I find more interesting. Because the call is at the dots, the smart defenceman no longer races to the puck. He races to the dot, angles his body across the forechecker's line, and lets the officiating do the rest. That is a skill, and it is not the skill the rule was written to reward.

I would rather see the decision moved to a fixed line with camera assistance than pretend a human eye can split a photo finish while also policing the boards.

We fixed the collision. We just moved the argument.