Jared Boll gets NHL hearing for head shot on Patrick Maroon (Video)

Forward Jared Boll of the Columbus Blue Jackets is going to have a conversation with the NHL’s Department of Player Safety on Thursday after he made contact with the head of Anaheim Ducks forward Patrick Maroon in their game Tuesday night.

Maroon was hit by Boll at 4:02 of the second period in the Blue Jackets' 5-3 win. No penalty was assessed on the play and Maroon remained in the game.

A reminder on Rule 48:

48.1 Illegal Check to the Head – A hit resulting in contact with an opponent’s head where the head was the main point of contact and such contact to the head was avoidable is not permitted. 

In determining whether contact with an opponent's head was avoidable, the circumstances of the hit including the following shall be considered:

- Whether the player attempted to hit squarely through the opponent’s body and the head was not "picked" as a result of poor timing, poor angle of approach, or unnecessary extension of the body upward or outward.

- Whether the opponent put himself in a vulnerable position by assuming a posture that made head contact on an otherwise full body check unavoidable.

- Whether the opponent materially changed the position of his body or head immediately prior to or simultaneously with the hit in a way that significantly contributed to the head contact.

Here’s an alternate view of the hit:

That second view makes this a bit closer to a legal hit than previously considered. It appears Boll is trying to go shoulder-to-shoulder with Maroon, who is looking down at the puck. But ultimately it appears the head remains the main point of contact, which is how we imagine the Department of Player Safety saw it too.

Boll’s last run-in with DoPS was Jan. 31, 2012, when he was fined $2,500 for an illegal check to the head of Joe Thornton. His last suspension was in 2008, and that was for instigating a fight in the last five minutes of a game.

So there might be some NHL discipline that followed frontier justice. Boll “answered the bell” later in the game against the Ducks’ Clayton Stoner:

Huh … quite the switcheroo: First time we’ve seen a Boll smoke a Stoner.

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