3 New Year's Resolutions for the NHL in 2025

A look at a few items the NHL should address in the New Year

This time of year is about New Year’s Resolutions, and the NHL should have a few on their list. Each NHL team has things they need to do better in the New Year, like a better penalty kill, scoring more goals, having healthy players, etc; the NHL can do better as a league, too. From player safety to paychecks to rules, a few things will hopefully be worked on in 2025, with the first being player safety.

NHL Needs to Get Stricter

It was obvious during the preseason when several players were the victims of dirty hits and had to miss out on the regular season, that the NHL needs to be stricter. Fans were outraged, and many complained about the NHL not doing enough to deter these types of behavior, especially when no points were on the line.

A previous article mentioned that the NHL should follow the PWHL’s stance on hits to the head, which should be at the top of their resolutions list. They need to do something to stop players from committing those hits. It’s dangerous, and if the NHL wants to have their top players playing all 82 games, they can’t take hits to the head that could knock them out anywhere from five games to an entire season.

The same can be said for any dirty play; the player should be automatically suspended if it’s intent to injure. Accidents happen, but it’s easy to tell when it’s on purpose, and those hits are unacceptable. Of course, the NHL has a rule stating players will be kicked out if their actions are intentional, but the referees have to make that call, and they rarely do.

An example of this happened earlier this season with the Minnesota Wild and Philadelphia Flyers when Garnet Hathaway purposely elbowed Joel Eriksson Ek in the face when Eriksson Ek was still recovering from a broken nose. Hathaway was fined $5,000, the maximum allowed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which doesn’t seem like much of a penalty when he makes over $2 million, according to PuckPedia.

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

If they want players to stop doing these things, they need to make the fines stiffer and have it affect the teams. This should be at the top of the list to address in 2025 so they can have healthy players and not ones sitting on the side, thanks to a dirty hit.

Increase the Salary Cap

This depends on revenue coming in, but the NHL is drastically behind other sports in terms of what they pay their players. Of course they can’t do the same because they don’t have the same number of viewers, but I’ve been reading the NHL isn’t sure how much the cap will go up because of those revenue numbers. They need to do everything they can to increase it as much as possible and not be stingy.