Collision Frequency in Elite Hockey on North American versus International Size Rinks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Body impact or collision is the risk factor underlying all sports-related concussions. This study sought to determine whether collision rates in elite hockey differ between games played on North American size rinks as compared to games played on larger international size ice surfaces. METHODS: Videotapes of games from the 2001 and 2002 National Hockey League Stanley Cup finals, World Junior championships and the 2002 Winter Olympics were analyzed, with all collisions counted and separated into various categories (player/player bodycheck, player/player into boards, player/boards, player/ice, head/stick, head/puck). Further subdivisions included collisions involving the head directly or indirectly. Twenty-two games were analyzed, 11 played on the small ice and 11 on the big ice. RESULTS: Significantly more collisions of all types (in all categories and subdivisions within categories) were found to occur on the smaller North American ice surface (P value differences from 0.01 to 0.00001). CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study showed significantly fewer collisions of all types in elite hockey games played on the international size ice surface. The comparison groups studied here did differ in some aspects other than ice size and so replication of the findings with even more closely matched groups will be needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn. However, if these findings are replicable, it would suggest that a change to uniform usage of the larger international rinks, with no rule changes or other alterations in the game, could provide direct primary prevention to reduce the number of collisions, and, by extension, concussions, that occur in the sport.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".