While that’s been the standard practice with NHL injury reporting for years, Dallas Stars head coach Ken Hitchcock says enough is enough. Hitchcock says he doesn’t understand why teams need to be so vague with player ailments, and that the vagueness causes unnecessary guessing games.

While meeting with reporters in Dallas earlier this week, Hitchcock said, “I think we collectively hate playing the game. What I mean by that is that we say ‘upper body.’ then you go on the phone, and then you look things up or you go to the doctors, find out what part of the upper body...so we try to make your work easier, quite frankly.”

He added, “It’s just easy to tell you what it is and let’s move forward. It’s just the whole game. It’s an injury, and within two hours after we tell you it’s ‘upper body,’ you know exactly what it is, so why not just tell you?”

The NHL itself is to blame for the ambiguity when it comes to injury listings. The league permits teams to simply list their players with an “upper body” or “lower body” injury without requiring specifics.

Defenders of the policy will say that refusing to release specifics on injuries will effectively protect the injured players. If opposing teams know a player is nursing a sore knee, they may cruelly decide to take an extra swipe at the ailing knee in order to get him out of the game.

Washington Capitals head coach Barry Trotz told ESPN, “I think you want to protect the player a little bit. Players in the league will target certain parts of the body.”

While that notion sounds sensible enough, Hitchcock refuted it. He said, “The players don’t go out and say: ‘He has a broken left pinkie and we’re going to go after that pinkie.’ Nobody thinks like that.”

The National Football League, for example, requires teams to be very specific with injury updates. Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman recently lashed out at the league’s policy by claiming that the specific updates aid nobody other than gamblers. “Maybe somebody should look into that, because I thought we weren’t a gambling league and we were against all those things,” he said. “But our injury report is specifically to make sure the gamblers get their odds right.”

Hitchcock says the time is now to get more specific with injuries in hockey. “Our feeling is just tell the public what the injury is. Let’s stop the dance.”