from Denis P. Gorman at the News & Observer,
Walk into the office on the 12th floor of the of the league’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters and you would think you are in the middle of a hockey fan’s dream.
There is a wall-sized projection screen surrounded on the left and right by four large flat screen televisions mounted on a wall. Work stations are equipped with smaller televisions and laptops.
But the people in this room are not watching the televised games for fun. They are waiting to see if there are acts of violence on the ice that might require punishment beyond what the refs can levy.
“A good night for us is when nothing interesting happens,” says Patrick Burke, Director of Player Safety. “We don’t get to enjoy the game like a fan does or even like a lot of media does. We’re just sitting around, waiting for somebody to do something stupid.”
The department was created in 2011 when NHL commissioner Gary Bettman decided that the league’s increasing emphasis on dealing with violence created too much work for the Hockey Operations staff to handle and needed to administered by a separate agency.
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