RIP Timur Faizutdinov.
Recently, I have been thinking that total head protection could be better designed than the current helmet. What about a full face/neck shield device. Obviously it would require much superior engineering than what is currently available on the market, but driven by the wealth of the NHL i am sure something could be developed. You could incentivize player and club adoption by allowing small AR advances to be displayed heads up inside the helmet: period time, pp/pk scoreclock, potentially a microphone system with the coach. You could even make adoption optional, but teams/players adopting could potentially start to develop a small advantage on ice. But also, overall safety would be greatly improved if you could design something that would protect the entire face, back of head, and neck while allowing for visibility, air flow, and unrestricted motion. It can't be beyond our abilities to design this. Like a space helmet but no where near as bulbous.
It would could even offer a total advancement of the sport. I have previously proposed other futurist oriented changes to hockey, namely replacing all on ice reffing with off ice panels aided by drones and cameras. I'm sorry this is a bit of a tangent but I have been thinking about it a lot lately and this event is so tragic and has me thinking of it again.
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