The NHL is reactionary, and new rules in new CBAs can often be traced directly to incidents in the past that they didn’t like and want to prevent. Chicago, Toronto and Arizona have all been front and centre over the life of the 2013 CBA using the LTIR rules in ways the drafters of those extremely complex rules never intended.
Joffrey Lupul, Marian Hossa, Chris Pronger, Stephane Robidas, David Clarkson and Nathan Horton have all passed through at least one of those three teams on LTIR at the end of their careers. All of them existed somewhere on the continuum of not exactly fully healthy to totally unable to play in Horton’s case.