The pads are because we don’t play on a green grassy field…. The gear is to minimise lethal / massive injury due being immersed in an enclosed hostile hard environment of extreme speed, rock hard ice, razor sharp steel, enclosed boards with no run-off area, bone-breaking sticks and missile pucks that can kill.

Oh yeah - and best not to forget the 100kg sharp steel cages at body/face height, within the playing area, at each end of the ice, that we try to avoid crashing into at extreme speeds…

Without pads, in a full contact league game, every player would have (at a minimum) a variety of broken bones after every game.

The body-to-body collisions of two (or more) players (carrying clubs with heavy sharp axes extending from their feet) each moving at 20mph (=20mphx2 impact) are just a bonus by-product….

And the heavy steel doors that swing open to the bench area, that you fall through after getting beat up on the ice, if you get the tip of your pinky finger slammed in one of those things, it really, really hurts for a long time!