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Last year the N.H.L. passed a rule restricting the curvature of the sticks to H in., but Detroit's Roger Crozier says that that is not enough. "One of these nights," he warns, "somebody's going to be hurt bad—and it won't necessarily be a goalkeeper." In a recent N.H.L. game in Toronto, he notes, 40 shots left the ice and hurtled into the crowd. By contrast, in a match the following night between the Canadian Nationals and the touring Soviet national hockey team, which uses only flat-bladed sticks, only three shots went astray. Nonetheless, when the Russians flew home this month, they carried with them an ample stock of curved sticks.