Congratulations to the League and to fans of rivalries. The “old” playoff format of battling within your division (sorry, conference) the first two rounds takes over next season. If you don’t hate your neighbor by the end of the regular season, you’ll definitely hate em’ come playoff time, and then the following season you’ll get to do it again.

“Real hatred”, “will make for great rivalries”, “there will really be some rough and tumble hockey”, all quotes I’ve heard on TV and radio the last couple of days.

So we’re amping up and promoting the physical play, the rivalries, the likelihood for chippiness, yet we’re still hearing a lot of whining about fighting from a few who never laced on a pair of skates. (I realize the argument isn't limited to this demographic). So let’s see, as the ire builds, the physicality naturally increases, we’re going to attempt to reduce the amount of hitting and self-policing some more?! Increase the hate, but stuff a sock in the release valve? Sorry Doctor, bad idea; this does not compute and kudos to the League for coming out and simply stating so. Now stick to your guns.

Two pre-notes before I present a write-up I did in February that covers not just the head injury angle. (It’s logical and it saves me having to write the same argument(s) for a tenth time and it still applies today)

1) Yes I realize Derek Boogaard is now deceased. I had met him, interviewed him, liked him, think it is a personal tragedy for his family. Yes, I read the three-part series in the New York Times about his life and demise. Yes, there could be brain damage related to getting punched in the head two hundred times, just as someone could be brain damaged from body checks, falling on the ice, working in a coal mine, playing football, wakeboarding, drinking too much, or doing too many drugs, etc.

2) The players know the risks, they know the potential repercussions of fights, are quite familiar with the hazards, as affirmed in a Globe and Mail story Wednesday. 100% polled said the game shouldn’t change. There are many far more dangerous occupations that pay a whole lot less. And it’s really not about the money. Ask a sports writer if he’d rather make $75 grand a year writing full time or playing 82 hockey games if he had a choice. I’d take playing a game over the buffet, but that’s just me, and of course at this point, it’s just hypothetical. The actual point; its hockey, you’d play if you could and you’d be well aware of the hazards. If you’d only want to play in a no-hit league if young and able-bodied, then you should only be able to write about one. Go write about coal miners, a really dangerous job, or air pollution, which kills many in the population gradually, or go picket auto-racing.


From Feb:

The fight debate rages anew. Not because goons Derek Boogaard, Colton Orr, or Raitis Ivanans have fight-related concussions, which would be a legitimate reason for banning staged heavyweight fights, but mainly because we’ve just had a few gong shows (violent melees between the Bruins/Stars, Bruins/Habs, and Pens/Isles) and some mainstream (non-hockey) writers who haven’t watched a hockey game in six years and wouldn’t know a puck from a flying saucer said it was a “black mark on the game”.

So let’s see, we ban fighting cold turkey, and these writer guys and all those millions of alleged dormant hockey fans out there, will suddenly become hard-core NHL disciples. Yeah right, and to quote “Wayne’s World”, monkeys will fly out of my butt.

If you really want to ban fighting, here’s how you ban fighting: Like anything else to work effectively over the long run, to change something engrained in a game and a sports culture, which is attractive to a great majority of those involved, it takes a generation or two. It starts with the kids.

My son plays pee wee in southern Pennsylvania and Delaware, kind of a traditional/non-traditional hybrid market. Like everywhere else in USA Hockey presently, the league allows full-scale hitting. Not to remove or bump a player off the puck, but to appease dad in the stands who has instructed sonny to “knock him on his ass”. I see inappropriate hits, glove punches to the head, frustration, anger, and fear to touch the puck. Some of the kids on my son’s team are rendered useless throughout the game because they’re frightened. Currently I guess this is what one might call a weeding out process.

These are pee wees, whose parents were weaned on the Broad Street Bullies. In the more rural areas, where we played a game this past weekend and had fans screaming at coaches after hits from behind, they were weaned on college football and NASCAR. Again, the daddy who wants to see sonny “run ‘em through the boards” would fall into the wouldn’t-know-a-puck-from-a-flying-saucer category. He’s into the game because it’s football on ice and his kids gonna be tougher than yours. They don’t watch the Red Wings and they’re not familiar with the Red Army team of Krutov, Larionov, and Malakov, or the Finnish Elite league. Neither are the locals in Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Sunrise or Tampa.

So you ban the hits in pee wee, bantam, midget, and junior hockey, and away goes the anger and the frustration and the fear that comes from playing. You also get more kids to play. Naturally over time, as a few of these kids become pro’s, hitting will evolve into more “removing the puck” and less “removing the head”.

If fight-abolitionists want Olympic hockey: No fights, more effective and less violent hits; you have to start the process at the grass roots level. It has to become “normal” for the game. You can’t have violence instilled in the game at a young age, with the accompanying fear and intimidation factors, and expect the resulting anger, frustration, and violent reactions to disappear as they get older. Right now, you play hockey, you get pissed off.

If you want the European Style of play, the international rules, then it has to become cultural. We can’t flip a switch.

There’s your answer, abolitionists, if you actually decide to head in the no-fight direction. I don’t have a problem with it, I love watching Red Wings style puck possession, and Olympic hockey, and plus I’ll be dead by the time the complete overhaul takes affect.

No other way makes sense, for the same reason the ban concept in general, in part, doesn’t make sense either.

Why would we be banning all fights again? Theory one: Oh that’s right; to make the game more attractive to more people who are presently not fans. Which is a myth by the way; and what about the millions of fans, and the thousands of hockey people who like the game just the way it is, or almost the way it is? Those who have been a part of the sport their entire lives? Why are we forcing change on them, our pure, unrelenting core?

Oh my God, we’d better ban fighting, we’re gonna blow our chance to go mainstream! We might not be taken seriously and become a legitimate top-four sport again. Whoopee! How about we don’t go mainstream? Look around, mainstream is moronic and it sucks. (We’re already seeing our “culture”, aka $$, put dents in the game, but that’s another blog.)

A great majority of those who don’t watch hockey don’t watch it because they don’t understand it and they don’t like it. Fights are not the problem. In fact, the hits and the fights are what attract the curious among the non-traditional. Most of the eight thousand locals who show us for the game in Atlanta, and those who attend minor league games in non-traditional markets, are showing up for the hits and maybe, if they’re lucky, to see a fight, just like they go to the race track to see a crash. These people aren’t from Nova Scotia, they didn’t play pond hockey, and they don’t share the love of shinny. It’s why the markets are called non-traditional.

Even those who work at the NHL who don't know the game very well, know enough to show huge hits and scraps on their online and TV highlight packages.

Theory two: Its violent, it’s dangerous. Yeah, it’s also hypocritical. Our society is violent (see guns, knives, 277,000 shooting deaths in the USA over the last eight years), so since when should hockey be “Leave it to Beaver”. A good many NFL football players are essentially crippled by the time they get their AARP cards, and NASCAR and Formula One drivers die (!) participating in their sport. If you’re a pacifist, then take up those causes would you? Or round up some buddies and picket about the Middle East. In hockey fights, there is no weapon used, just mano-y-mano fisticuffs, last time I checked. We don’t want the stick to be used as a weapon or send a message: Bad alternative. (they did that stick swinging in the old days, just ask 86-year-old Ted Lindsay or 83-year-old Gordie Howe)

I don’t get it. The mainstream attractiveness thing is horse dirt, and the violence element is limited. Meanwhile, the concussion issue in fights is almost restricted to the over-sized goons, who I’ll address in a moment. The great majority of concussions in hockey come from hits. Are you ready to abolish hitting? I can’t see you having it both ways. A physically violent game, involving clubs in your hands and blades on your feet, needs an outlet. Limited fighting, between players with a legitimate cause, is an element the game, in its current form, requires.

So if you’re not going to be patient, and change the culture and style of the sport over time, as I have suggested earlier, then you have to compromise. You can’t go cold turkey on an engrained culture. As it stands, your lone prevention of cheap, violent behavior would be secondary discipline. How’s that working out for you?

I’m glad I brought up the Red Wings. No goon on the roster, no staged fights. The 12 or so fighting majors they’ll end up with this season will have come for a reason: Fights between hockey players, not “enforcers”. Not only is Detroit your model franchise in terms of perennially winning, they should be the NHL’s poster boys in terms of the fight issue.

The compromise: Lose the goons. Staged fights are banished. Every player on every team should be able to play hockey. If the hockey players fight, they should fight for a legitimate reason, in retaliation for a dangerous or cheap play, or as an explosive reaction to frustration (which may change momentum). No one should have a problem with this if you’re going to continue to play the game as an aggressive North American sport. Meanwhile, do instill the “secondary discipline culture” as it relates to third man in and line brawls. Go ahead, ban them, and stringently enforce these penalties when they’re broken. Lose the gong shows.

I don’t even have a problem with the instigator rule as it relates to the minor penalty. Go ahead, give a clear instigator two minutes, but lose the damn suspension that comes with three violations. Legitimate, tough hockey players should not be banned from play for coming to the defense of a teammate on in reaction to a cheap shot. Occasional old time hockey has its place, if it’s legitimate.

See now, that’s compromise. Bob Probert and Joey Kocur were great, but that was twenty years ago. Gretzky scored a lot because he had Semenko and then McSorley, remember that? Remember the “Great One”, and what helped make him great? All of that is gone now too.

We can change, but let’s keep it somewhat within reason. You’re talking about a culture, a continent, a religion here.


Follow Rob on twitter @simmerpuck

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