This was a another fantastic weekend for hockey.
We saw OV hit 60, Jagr reach 640, Okposo, Pouiliot and Stralman each score their first and JR notch his league-leading ninth game-winning goal.
We saw Malkin hit 100, Sakic reach 1000 (assists) and Dion Phaneuf score his first shorthanded goal on a Bobby Orr-style rush.
We saw Backman setup three goals in the third period, Backstrom score twice in the final frame and another Backstrom stop 30 of 31 in a huge win.
The Isles played without Sim, Bates, Campoli, Sillinger, Sutton, Nielsen, Gervais, Hilbert, Fedotenko, Witt, Dipietro while the Ducks struggled to keep up without Giguere, Perry, Pronger and Getzlaf but still won.
Jim Hughson called two games in the same day, Iginla scored three against the Wild and Stajan blocked four on the same PK.
Gomez, Komisarek & Kelly were hurt while Bergeron and Numminen were able to skate.
Zetterberg scored his 40th, Morrow his 30th and Ellis picked up win #20 thanks to a huge glove save with the season on the line.
Washington outshot Atlanta 23-2 in the third period of a huge comeback, and San Jose outshot Anaheim 17-0 in the third period of a huge statement game.
Pittsburgh scored five in a period against New Jersey, Philly won two huge games and the Rangers went to yet another shootout.
Montreal moved to 8-0 against Boston and Biron improved to 6-0 against the Islanders.
The Oilers and Leafs refused to lose, despite the stacked odds against them.
Sadly, we also lost another great reporter in George Gross who was working and doing what he loved, just days before he passed away. Gross was quoted in the Sun after his 85th birthday, saying:
"I didn't put 24 hours a day into it but maybe 15-16 hours. I never regretted one minute. I enjoyed the athletes, the people, the journalists. If you have the time for journalism you can accomplish a lot."
Unfortunately they just don’t make ‘em like they used to anymore…
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As much as I wanted to go into more detail about all the moments and storylines from the weekend, I decided that I needed to follow-up on the piece I wrote this week – it’s too important a story to just let go. So here it is…
KURTIS FOSTER IS AN ACCEPTABLE LOSS
Every couple years a player in the National Hockey League will be carried off the ice on a stretcher after suffering a career threatening injury on a similar play.
Maybe it will be icing.
Maybe it will be waved off.
The result of the play won’t matter, although the result of the collision will – to the player, his teammates, his family, players around the league, and the fans.
But it won’t matter to the decision makers in the NHL.
A shattered heel, fractured leg or dislocated hip every now and then is no big deal.
We’ve seen it before and we’ll see it again.
Al MacInnis. Mark Tinordi. Pat Peake. Marco Sturm. Kurtis Foster.
“That’s Hockey.”
There isn’t another business in the world where a Company would pay millions of dollars for an asset - in some cases building the whole organization around that asset - but then refuse to take steps to protect that asset.
There will always be injuries in hockey. It is the most beautiful but also the most physical sport around. I am absolutely against toning down the intenseness or physicality of the sport.
BUT, if there is a way to protect players in certain instances that have proved to be extremely dangerous, isn’t it a no-brainer?
With the elimination of two-line passes and the creation of the trapezoid, there will surely be more of these incidents than in the past.
The questions that the league needs to answer are: How many times a game does a forward win a hotly contested race for icing? How many times does that play result in a scoring opportunity?
There’s a really simple solution to all of this that I mentioned in the comment section of my post this week. Turns out that some semblance of that rule is used in the USHL, as described by Bob McKenzie on TSN.ca. You can institute no-touch icing and still give the linesman discretion to wave it off if the forward has a clear advantage in the race for the puck. If the defender has a couple steps or it’s too close to call then you blow the whistle.
Some may enjoy those races for the puck, each with its own potential for a catastrophic injury but it’s just not worth it. Simply put, the league needs to protect its players, the teams need to protect their assets and the PA needs to protect its members.
Over the years we’ve seen the National Football League continue to take steps to make the game safer for its players:
* Quarterback were being hurt too frequently so rules were put in to allow the quarterback to throw the ball away when he was out of the pocket. They allowed the QB to slide at the end of a run so he wouldn’t be hit. They put in the ‘in the grasp’ rule – allowing the referee to use his judgment and save players from taking huge hits. They added a rule where the play is blown dead if a defensive player was offside and an ‘unabated threat’ to the quarterback.
* Then Carson Palmer and a couple other QBs were injured on low hits and the league put in a rule prohibiting defenders from hitting a passer in the knee or lower. And they began to enforce roughing the passer rules even more strictly.
* Knee injuries were a concern league-wide so they banned clipping and peel-back blocks. They eliminated chop blocks on kicking plays and plays where a defensive player was already engaged with another offensive player.
* Collisions were getting too violent on on-side kicks so they put in a rule last year that you had to have at least four players on each side of the ball on a kickoff.
* One player’s tackling was causing injuries so the league banned the ‘horse-collar’ tackle. Then the next year they expanded the rule to include grabbing the inside of a player’s jersey in addition to his shoulder pads.
* Long snappers were at risk so the league decided that defensive players should not be able to line up directly over their position during field goals and extra point attempts.
* Players were smelling blood after turnovers or special teams plays and were throwing potentially devastating hits on offensive players. The league decided to eliminate needless blocks on punters and kickers away from the play. And they put in a rule that started “Players cannot run, dive into, cut, or throw their bodies against or on an opponent who is out of the play or should not have reasonably anticipated such contact.”
* Concussions became a significant issue and the league banned both hits to the helmet and hits with the helmet. They started fining players for playing with their chin-strap unbuckled.
I love the history and tradition of the National Hockey League. But professional sports leagues and all companies evolve over time.
If Kurtis Foster wasn’t so worried about being able to walk down the aisle at his wedding this summer, these quotes by anonymous General Managers from Bob McKenzie’s posting at TSN would be funny:
"Do we have to make a rule change every time someone gets hurt?"
"Why don't we eliminate forwards from making cut-back moves because they are prone to being kneed?"
"We have to be careful not to be too reactionary to specific incidents."
Look at what the National Football League has done to protect its players and compare that to the rule changes that the NHL has implemented.
It’s a joke.
But we’re talking about a league that took eleven years after a player hit his head and died on the ice to make helmets mandatory. ELEVEN years – and even then it was grandfathered in, giving veterans a choice.
Barely more than ten years ago the National Hockey League still had a player skating around without a helmet.
It’s sad but I don’t think anything is going to change when it comes to player safety unless the PA takes a stand.
So we’ll continue to see the stretcher out on the ice and that horrible scene that we all dread after seeing a hit from behind or a vicious hit to the head.
And we’ll see career-ending injuries once in a while and teams can only hope that it’s not their star player who is forced to leave the game too soon.
Sorry about your leg Kurtis, but “That’s hockey”.
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Also, in case you missed this posting from September I wanted to bring it up again. It’s a good companion piece, I think..
Bigger, Stronger, Faster and More Dangerous Than Ever Before
September 10, 2007
The perfect hit.
One player lines up another in his sights and uses his entire force to knock out the other player, who often doesn't even see it coming.
Stevens knocking out Lindros.
Quinn crushing Orr.
Campbell demolishing Umberger.
Everyone remembers a perfect hit.
It can bring a crowd to its feet.
It can change the momentum of a game or a series.
It can have devastating effects on an individual.
One hit can end a career - or worse.
Throughout the course of last season I wrote quite a bit about concussions and cheap-shots and the risk to players of a serious life-altering injury. Far too many players have had their careers cut short because of concussions - players like Pat Lafontaine, Mike Richter, Brett Lindros, Jeff Beukeboom, Keith Primeau, Nick Kypreos, Scott Stevens, Adam Deadmarsh, Dave Taylor, Geoff Courtnall and Mike Eaves. And this past season there were far too many players carried off on stretchers.
But it could have been worse - so much worse.
On Sunday, what seemed like a routine play in an NFL game between the Bills and Broncos ended in an absolutely horrible tragedy. Bills’ tight end Kevin Everett suffered what is described by the Associated Press to be a “catastrophic and life-threatening spinal-cord injury” and is “unlikely to walk again”.
This isn’t the first such tragedy in NFL history and unfortunately it won’t be the last - that is the nature of a sport where violent collisions occur on each and every play. But one thing that I noticed when watching all the games this weekend was that a violent sport has become much more vicious than ever before. It used to be that every few games you’d see a hit that would absolutely amaze you and be shown over and over on highlight reels throughout the week. Now it seems like each week there’s a whole reel of hits like that, each hit more violent than the next.
Hockey and football are extremely physical sports and the hits are not only expected but encouraged. But the thing that is troubling is that players have become bigger, stronger and faster than ever before and thus the hits are more dangerous than ever before.
Think about the most feared and/or most physical players that you watched growing up. Chances are, many of these names come to find:
Mark Messier - 6’1, 205
Marty McSorley - 6’1, 190
John Kordic - 6’1, 190
Cam Neely - 6’1, 185
Dave Schultz - 6’1, 185
Joe Kocur - 6’0, 220
Rick Tocchet - 6’0, 214
Gordie Howe - 6’0 , 205
Chris Nilan - 6’0, 205
Rob Ray - 6’0, 203
Scott Stevens - 6’0, 200
John Ferguson - 6’0, 178
Wendel Clark - 5’11, 197
Tiger Williams - 5’11, 190
Vlad Konstantinov - 5’11, 176
Maurice Richard - 5’10, 180
Carl Brewer - 5’10, 180
Bobby Clarke - 5’10, 176
When I broke down the rosters last season I learned that 23% of NHL players were 6’3 or over and 79% were at least 6 feet.
Six-foot-three used to be the size of giants - like Bob Probert, Dave Semenko, Gino Odjick. Now nearly 1/4 of the league is that size or taller. I posted this list a few months back but I think it’s worth another look:
6’9 - Chara
6’7 - Boogaard, Gill
6’6 - Pronger, Sutton, Cairns, Norton, Antropov
6’5 - Coburn, Hatcher, Fischer, Mezei, Belak, Rathje, Cullimore, Mikhnov, Malik, Sundin, Alexeev, McGrattan, Rupp, Rommodore, Kozlov, Winchester, Handzus, Foster, Parker, Chouinard, Babchuk, Wozniewski, Parros, Vasicek, Lindros
6'4 - Allen, Bell, Arnott, Alberts, Lecavalier, Welch, Bouwmeester, McLaren, White, Richardson, Burns, Komisarek, Pyatt, Zubrus, Staal, Staal, Malone, Novotny, Linden, Holik, Penner, Kilger, Whitney, Thornton, Primeau, Jacques, Mara, Ponikarovsky, Green, Tallackson, Vaananen, Gaustad, Brookbank, Lehtonen, Modin, Rissmiller, Lowe, Auld, Harrison, Souray, Shelley, Muir, Nash, Jurcina, Kubina, McKee, Peters, Gratton
6'3 - 79 players
6'2 - 131 players
6'1 - 140 players
6'0 - 119 players
Bigger. Faster. Stronger. More dangerous than ever before.
The league has made some strides in the right direction to protect its players but I believe that they absolutely need to do more, in conjunction with the Players’ Association.
Here are seven areas that I believe need to be examined closely.
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Hitting to the head should be penalized. Two-minutes for a minor infraction and five-and-a-game for anything deemed vicious or intentional. If you can enforce hitting to the head rules in football it shouldn’t be so difficult to figure out something that works on hockey - even with the height difference between players. If you can’t hook, trip or high-stick another player you shouldn’t be able to clock them in the head with your shoulder or forearm.
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Full audit of player equipment. Overhaul of legal shoulder/elbow pads. This should have happened already. It really is a no-brainer.
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No-touch icing. Of all the hockey games I’ve watched in my life I can’t say I recall that one amazing race for a puck that justifies the risk that players face going back to touch the puck for icing. We’ve seen some terrible injuries in past years but there’s no doubt that there’s a huge risk of a serious spinal injury the longer these races are allowed to play out.
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Severe Penalties for cheap-shots and hits from behind. It’s time to get serious about supplemental discipline. The “that’s hockey” attitude is out-dated and is a disservice to the vast majority of the players who play by the rules.
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Analysis of NHL arenas (boards, seamless glass, ice conditions, etc). If there’s anything that can be done to make the rink safer, let’s do it.
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Fighting. The league and the NHLPA needs to sit down and have a fair and unbiased discussion on the pros and cons of fighting. If it is determined that fighting has a place in the game long-term perhaps there are ways to make fighting safer for the players. If it’s determined that there’s just too much risk involved now that we have enforcers like Derek Boogaard (6'7) then they need to figure out what that means. Stricter penalties for fighting won’t take it out of the game completely - players will come to their teammates’ defence when needed no matter the consequence - but it may eliminate those needless fights with the 12th forward on each team trying to earn their 4 minutes of ice-time a night. That's how it is in the playoffs and International tournaments and you never hear people complaining about the lack of fighting.
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Mandatory mouth guards and chin straps done up properly. The training staff of each team needs to be sure that all precautions are taken to protect the organization’s assets - even if the players find it uncomfortable at first.
I’m very surprised that the horrendous injury suffered by Everett this weekend hasn’t become a bigger story. Maybe it’s because he isn’t a well-known player or maybe it is because this type of injury has happened before in the NFL. It’s sad that it is getting nowhere near the coverage that somebody like Terrell Owens gets for doing sit-ups on his driveway - but let’s hope that the right people take notice.
When there is a similar incident in the National Hockey League it will most definitely be front-page news and it will bring all the people who think hockey is too violent out of the woodwork to criticize our great game.
I don’t expect changes to occur overnight but let’s at least open up the dialogue between the league and the Players’ Association.
Hockey is a physical sport. That will never change.
But if there are preventative measures that could be put into place to make the game safer for its players then they have to be considered immediately - not after hockey suffers an on-ice tragedy.
Danny -
[email protected]
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