Later today, the NHL is going to slap St. Louis forward Maxim Lapierre with at least a five-game suspension for the hit from behind that put San Jose Dan Boyle in the hospital. Cody McLeod is undoubtedly going to be hearing soon from Brendan Shanahan as well for the hit that got Niklas Kronwall carried off on a stretcher in last night's Colorado vs. Detroit game.
Sometimes there are borderline boarding plays where the guy who gets hit is halfway between being turned to the side and facing the boards when he gets drilled. Sometimes, a player turns at the last instant, and it's too late to avoid the contact. In future blogs, I am going to talk about my views on the standards for boarding calls, high sticks and other infractions that can end up in major penalties and suspensions. In the two most recent cases, these were pretty obvious reckless hits so there's no need to dissect the plays here.
Instead, I want to talk about the on-ice response to these situations from my perspective as a referee who played an enforcer role when I was a minor league, WHA and NHL player. The short version of my view: I disliked the instigator rule from Day One, and I still don't like it now.
A lot of fans and some media types who don't do their homework mistakenly say that it was Gary Bettman who brought the instigator rule to the NHL. That is incorrect.
There were many previous attempts by the League to implement a similar rule. It was before the start of the 1992-93 season, prior to Bettman becoming commissioner, that the current rule was implemented: two minute minor/10-minute misconduct, game misconducts for late-game instigation, automatic NHL suspension upon a third instigator penalty in a season with increasing suspensions for additional instigation penalties.
Let me spin you a little yarn here.
I was a young referee in my first training camp in September 1983. I was sitting in a room, leaning back on my chair -- and maybe, just maybe, daydreaming a bit -- during a rule enforcement meeting. Scotty Morrison, John McCauley and Jim Gregory were standing at the front of the room. Most of it was stuff we already knew. However, when they got to part about John Ziegler (then the NHL's President) and the Board of Governors demanding officials to penalize fight instigators regardless of the circumstance, I literally fell out of my chair.
At any rate, I disliked the rule from the very start. It runs counter to the culture of the game I always knew and, quite frankly, it doesn't do a damn thing to serve as a deterrent. I just know that if I were a player on the ice and I saw my teammate get victimized by a dirty hit or careless swing of the stick, I was going to make the other side answer for it, instigator penalty or not.
Usually, I tried to take care of business instinctively and immediately. But maybe the opportunity wouldn't arise right away for me or one of my teammates. Maybe I would be a scratch in that particular game or maybe I wouldn't get another shift because of the time and score of the game. Ah, but I had a long memory. Hockey players (and refs) always do.
What it we didn't play that team again? Then I would make sure we settled it after the game in the parking lot, under the stands, or wherever else. That is truly how the game was policed by the players when I was playing. You settled it on the ice if possible, off the ice if necessary, but you settled it.
Now let's take what happened after the Lapierre/Boyle incident. San Jose's Andrew Desjardins immediately went after Lapierre, in defense of his teammate (who is also a team leader and a respected player around the League). Desjardins got an instigation penalty and misconduct out of it, but so what? He did the right thing.
As a referee, things need to be as black-and-white as possible: Something either is or is not a penalty, and you get paid to know and enforce the rulebook.
So if I was reffing that San Jose and St. Louis game, I would have no choice but to make the same set of calls that Eric Furlatt and Graham Skilliter did in that situation. They did their jobs and made the right calls. Let me also say this, however. In the same situation, I would have told Lapierre that he deserved to get his butt kicked and he better not expect me to protect him from answering for it.
When I was refereeing games, I would often say "go ahead" when two guys were acting like they wanted to square off. Believe me, that's not what some of the League's pseudo tough guys -- the yappers and trash talkers out there who really didn't want to take on all comers -- wanted to hear!
As far as penalizing cheapshots go, the rule book does NOT call for automatic game misconducts in every situation where a major penalty is assessed. For example, Rule 62 (spearing) does calls for an automatic game misconduct if there's a spearing major. Meanwhile, Rule 45 (elbowing) calls for an automatic major penalty in the event of an elbow to the face or head, but gives the referee discretion about assessing a match penalty. Rule 59 (cross-checking) is similar to Rule 45.
Here's a famous example of Rule 45: The referee, Don Van Massenhoven, applied both his knowledge of the rulebook AND his understanding of the culture of hockey. It happened in a 1996 game in which Montreal's Marc Bureau elbowed and injured Philadelphia's Petr Svoboda.
Van Massenhoven assessed an elbowing major to Bureau but did NOT issue a game misconduct. He did not have to under the rule book and it was a gutsy and accurate call by Don, who is a former policeman in the REAL sense of the term.
I never discussed this game with Van Massenhoven, but I'm sure he knew full well that someone was going to go after Bureau and that there'd probably be a lot of other fights as well. It would be up to him and his officiating teammates to maintain control of the game.
He also had to know he was going to make the night harder on himself and the crew. Even so, he was not about to essentially protect Bureau by hustling him to the locker room and letting everyone else spill their blood because one guy did something reckless and stupid and wasn't around to be held accountable for it.
Sure enough, a Philadelphia player, Craig MacTavish, got to Bureau and got him good in a fight at the end of the second period. MacTavish is someone with whom I personally feuded and later reconciled during my refereeing career (I'll save that story for some other time), but he was a well-respected veteran player in the NHL by this point in his career and he did what he had to do on behalf of teammate Svoboda. MacTavish didn't care a bit about the instigator penalty that Van Massenhoven had to tag on, nor should he have.
Final thoughts for now. A form of the instigator rule actually goes all the way back to the 1937-38 season. Want to know what the rule book said back then: "A Major penalty shall be imposed on any player who starts fisticuffs."
There's a hilarious routine by the late, great comedian George Carlin about politically correct language and the way words get added and the meaning gets muddied.
In World War I, some soldiers suffered from a disorder commonly "shell shock". Two syllables, two words; very direct and suggestive of the hell of war. In World War II, the same condition was described as "battle fatigue"; still understandable but now up to four syllables and sounding less harsh. By Korea and Vietnam, it became "operational exhaust." Now it was seven syllables and sounding more like something that happened to a car than a human being. In the post-Vietnam era, it became "post-traumatic stress disorder," and so encased in jargon that any humanity got drained from it.
Well, the same thing has happened in the NHL and other leagues. Do you want to know what the fighting and instigation-related rules (Rule 46) look like today? OK, well,
here they are.
Going back to that League-implemented attempt in 1983 to more stringently enforce instigator rules, the NHL wanted to put an end to the Broad Street Bullies' strategy of using fighting as an actual game tactic. That was the beginning of the end of it.
Look, the game evolves. Rules evolve. No one wants to go back to all the bench clearing brawls and that sort of thing!
However, the sport of hockey, at its root, is two groups of guys meeting up on a frozen pond and battling it out, then going back to their side of the pond to have a meal and some beers with their teammates.
Why should the game apologize for or be ashamed of that?
One of the saddest things that ever happened to hockey, in my opinion, is that the lawyers and coat holders (AKA folks who never played and are legislators, not actual doers) took over as it became big business. The sport has spent so much time, effort and money trying to win over the segments of the public and the media who NEVER liked, understood or cared about the game and never will.
Let the game have some personality. Let it be emotional. That's hockey. As a player of the 1970s to early 1980s and a ref of the 1980s to 2000s, I found instigator penalties to be a non-deterrent to players and, at least in my opinion, more of a headache than a help to officials.
Look, I didn't make the rules. I was just paid to enforce them to the best of my ability, and I gave it my all to do so. My personal opinions were not part of that equation when I was on the ice.
COMING NEXT TIME (Thurs., Oct 24): Teammwork among officials
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born person to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the only American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
Today, Stewart is a judicial and league discipline consultant for the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL) and serves as director of hockey officiating for the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC).
The longtime referee heads Officiating by Stewart, a consulting, training and evaluation service for officials, while also maintaining a busy schedule as a public speaker, fund raiser and master-of-ceremonies for a host of private, corporate and public events. As a non-hockey venture, he is the owner of Lest We Forget.
Stewart is currently working with a co-author on an autobiography. 
Blogger •Former NHL Referee • 
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