The AHL unveiled a new website earlier Tuesday (if you don’t see a change yet, give it time). It’s fancy and probably works better with your fancy ever-so-smart handy phones, but it’ll freak me out for the rest of my life take some getting used to for me.
There was some good news, though: Our buddy in Wilkes-Barre, Jason, pointed out that you can once again manually enter URLs and pull up future box scores, complete with officials assignments. (Schlenker, Moser/K.Briganti, Briggs! Voss, Mullen/N.Briganti, Galvin!) (At the same time, there’s a lot you can’t kajigger like that like you used to, though it seems as if some of that might return at some point.)
And the new rule book made its PDF debut on the new site, too, the sure sign of a new year.
As has become traditional, the formatting is different enough from last year’s that it’s hard to do a side-by-side comparison. I retreated to checking the last word in each line. I mostly tried checking them while whispering a Jon Lovitz Master Thespian voice. Some don’t even need the voice.
“official rule side automatically icing the nearest official.” (cold, man)
“net allowed attacking the off ice team.” (but net, why, they’re so nice)
“puck a all by defending physical linesman official as appropriate.” (and when would it not be appropriate?)
Anyway. We knew most of this from the summer, but there were a few mild surprises among this year’s changes.
1.10: No more #dryscrape, just a shovel like they do at promotional time outs.
5.2: Clarifies that when an ineligible player is identified to a referee, the player will be removed with no substitute allowed. There’s no penalty on the ice, but it’s reported to league.
23.7: A new section covering the new rules on fighting and suspension: 10 fighting majors equals a one-game suspension, with an additional one-game suspension for the 11th, 12th and 13th fighting majors. On 14 and thereafter, it’s a two-game suspension for each. A major won’t count toward your total if your opponent instigated the altercation.
The other two sections in Rule 23 move up one, including the old 23.7, now 23.8, which does nothing but refer back to 20.4.
24.2: Fixes missing language in the penalty-shot spin-o-rama rule. The end of the paragraph cut off in mid-sentence last year and didn’t say that it was no goal.
33.2: “When goals are scored in the final minute of a period where tenths of seconds are shown on the clock, the time of the goal shall be rounded up to the nearest second for the official records.” Which reads wrong to me. If a goal is scored with 1.2 seconds left on the clock, that’s 19:58.8. It should be 19:58. This reads like 19:59. I’m sure the former is what it means, since we’re not in court.
34.3: No more dry scrape. Timekeeper sets the clock to 1:00, and after that, five minutes of OT.
35.6: Similar tenths-of-second language to 33.2 for the penalty timekeeper.
46.10: The “Staged Fights” rule: A fight right before, right at or right after a faceoff now brings game misconducts for the combatants, or for the instigator alone if there is one.
63.2: A tweak to the Hated Delay Of Game-Puck Over-Glass Rule: It’s now the position of the puck, not the player’s skates, that determines whether it has been cleared out of play from the defensive zone. If he’s in the zone but the puck is in the neutral zone: No penalty.
82.4: A team that ices the puck can no longer use its time out.
85.1: No more dry scrape. See 34.3.
86.1: If a puck hits the curved glass at the ends of the benches (new last year), it should be treated as if the puck is out of play.
88.1: Reiterates no time out for a team that just iced the puck.
There are, as usual, changes to some page references that changed.