If they do, you’re probably doing it wrong, unless you’ve been blasted so hard, the chinstrap or the snap holding it together breaks.

..in which case, a better chinstrap and snap can be easily designed.

Great example on the visors!

I can’t take total credit for the thought, actually. I recently heard an interview with Paul Maurice where he said that he wouldn’t be in favour of mandatory visors — despite the fact that his career was ended by an eye injury — unless they were grandfathered in like helmets were, and he cited grassroots enforcement as reason why we’ll eventually see total visor compliance.

NFL helmets are probably the most relevant to hockey comparisons, in terms of the type of impact. But NFL players have pretty severe concussion problems too.

And there’s new Helmets that have proven to lessen the impact and help prevent concussions.

Turn that on its head — what would a goaltender wear if their primary concern was 240 pound players flying elbows-first into their head?

He’d wear something like Hasek’s custom combo or Thomas’ Mage. One-piece, full coverage shells with a cage/visor similar to a football helmet or motorcycle helmet.

A goaltender’s mask is typically designed to distribute the impact of a low-mass (relative to a human body), high-speed projectile through the cage interface with the shell. Many modern masks have low profiles on the top and sides to force shots to hit the larger surface area of the cage. The force then follows a path from the cage, through the connections (typically with rubber bushings), into the semi-rigid shell, into the foam behind it, then into a large surface area around the peripheral of the face, the sides of the head, and chin. The design flaw in modern masks that relates to this discussion is that impacts from the side and rear aren’t allowed for in the design to the same extent that a line-of-sight impact is.

That’s why it makes more sense to have an all-around single surface shell for player helmets. Their design needs to deal with low speed (relative to a puck), high-mass impacts that come from numerous angles-of-impact. The deceleration aspects of one-piece vs. two-piece helmets is pretty basic. A large impact area (a player running into another player or street running into a rider’s head) needs more mass to dissipate the force. The dissipation would stop at the joint of a two-piece helmet. If the two-piece was two equal pieces you’ve distributed all of the force over half the area whereas a one piece has distributed all of the force over the whole area of the helmet. Therefore the foam/padding has to decelerate half as much as with a two-piece. Wouldn’t you rather have the whole helmet working for you or just half?

One of the main problems with making hockey helmets larger is the increase risk of neck damage. It’ll be interesting to see the long term stats on this helmet, compared to others when it comes to snapped necks.

That’s only a problem if you’ve added mass to the neck system. Are the new helmets substantially heavier than traditional lids? If not, then all you’ve done is increase surface area, which has increased the force-distribution area with is a win-win.

I could imagine you’d get a decent step-up in performance if helmets were custom molded to players heads, much like how high-end goaltender helmets are. They’d help some.

Agreed. This is something that I’ve thought about, and could be done with NHLer resources.

When it comes to the padding, you shouldn’t disregard motorcycle helmets as a comparison so easily (maybe you already noticed this, judging by your first paragraph here). Even if there isn’t nearly as much padding, there still is padding and it has the same effect when it comes to preventing concussions (even if that isn’t a motorcycle helmet’s point), namely gradual deceleration. Modern technology should be able to help with this effect.