Chara, Shore, and the Game I Love

(Note to readers: due to onerous time constraints--see previous post--I am writing this blog entry over a number of days, rather than all at once as is my usual custom; I apologize for the 'old news'.)

You'd never know it from the media hysteria of late, but hockey has always been a rough sport. To my mind, it's not as violent as any of the individual combat sports, and it doesn't seem as violent as football. (Watching people piling on to the players they catch in football makes me wonder how we don't see human pancakes after each and every play). But hockey has never made a claim to gentility.

In 1934, a player named Eddie Shore--ironically enough, a Boston Bruin defenseman now in the Hockey Hall of Fame--ended the career of Toronto Maple Leaf Ace Bailey with a vicious check from behind. Bailey's head (they didn't wear helmets in those days) hit the ice and he went into convulsions; he was diagnosed with a fractured skull. He lived, but never played hockey again.

Fast forward to 2011. A Boston Bruins defenseman named Zdeno Chara--quite possibly a future Hall of Famer--checked Max Pacioretty of the Montreal Canadiens into a stanchion at the players' bench. Pacioretty suffered a severe concussion and a fractured vertebra; if he plays hockey again it'll be a blue-sky miracle.

Shore was suspended 16 games for his check. Chara got nothing beyond the interference penalty and misconduct assessed at the time. The check was deemed a "hockey play" gone horribly wrong.

This has polarized the league and its fanbase. Air Canada, a major sponsor of the NHL, wrote a letter on company letterhead threatening to withdraw sponsorship unless something was done to protect the players and the integrity of the game. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman essentially told Air Canada to go puck itself. Meanwhile, in hockey forums all over the Internet, the debate rages: should Chara have been suspended? Was his hit intentional?

My answers, for what they're worth, are (1) undoubtedly and (2) who cares.

There's precedent for (2) in the official rules. Rule 60.3 on high sticking states that all contact causing injury, whether careless or accidental, merits a double-minor penalty.

You can argue malicious intent into the seventh period of overtime: the carelessness of Chara's action is what matters to me. The check was already deemed illegal, contravening Rule 56.1 (interference). In my view, any illegal play resulting in an injury should merit a suspension regardless of intent.

There has been some talk of toughening up the suspensions. I'm all for this, provided the NHL doesn't try to match their length to the length of time the injured player is out. It sounds just: end someone's career and there goes yours. It makes sense, especially since many of the offending players are fourth liners, barely NHLers, and in the past calendar year in particular they've managed to injure a couple of All-Star teams. Savard. Crosby. Malkin. Richards. Now Pacioretty, an up and coming Hab.

But sometimes the offenders themselves are star players. Chara is one such. Alex Ovechkin has a mean streak to his game. I can easily picture a coach instructing Joe Fourthliner to go down like a shot the next time Ovechkin knees him. Joe Fourthliner would then sit out the next couple of games with his "injury", one of which would just happen to be the second leg of a home-and-home. Coaching triumph: Ovechkin's neutralized.

No, I'd rather just see the suspensions toughened up in general. Two or three games is a joke. It doesn't teach the player anything worth learning. Ten games should be the minimum suspension handed out, and they could ramp up from there. A second offense would mean a season long suspension, including playoffs if applicable. For something like the Todd Bertuzzi hit on Steve Moore--blatant, premeditated thuggery--a lifetime ban should be considered. It is my considered opinion that Todd Bertuzzi should not be playing hockey right now.

What has changed in the game since 1934?

Quite a few things. Speed, size and skill, of course. No disrespect to the players of that era, some of whom (like Eddie Shore) put up impressive numbers, but there's simply no comparison. They didn't have people almost seven feet tall back then; the 100-mph slapshot wouldn't be seen for almost thirty years, and if you watch footage of a game from even 1970. it looks like everybody except Bobby Orr is skating through thick mud. There were earlier speedsters, but it's all relative; the fastest skaters of the '30s probably wouldn't make the NHL of today. Again, I mean no disrespect: hockey in those ancient times was a hobby, not a real profession. And it paid like one.

Protective equipment has evolved. In the 30s the players might as well have been naked: their heads actually were. The modern hockey player, by comparison, is the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

As I mentioned above, the money certainly has changed. The average team was worth less than $100,000 in the 1930s. In today's dollars, a million, give or take. But then today, the average individual player's salary is over $2 million. Think about that for a second. Adjusting for inflation, the average player makes more than twice what an entire team and its chattels were worth in 1934. It's worth noting, too, that the rise in salaries has been a relatively recent phenomenon: the average NHL'er in 1990 made $271,000.

All of these changes over time have been cited to explain the rise in serious injuries. The size and speed are obvious contributing factors; the protective equipment can generate a false sense of security/invincibility; the remuneration motivates players to stay in the major league by any means necessary. If that means hurting people, so be it.

There's something profoundly wrong with a sport that tolerates or even encourages that last. "Hurting people" should never be the object of any team sport, unless you count "war" as a sport. Stiff suspensions would rapidly do away with that piece of barbaric hockey culture, too.

One other change in the game over the past eighty or so years, again a very recent one: we now have two referees and two linesmen on the ice, in addition to ten skaters and two goalies. The extra referee was added to better police the game, and I'd say it's time to junk that experiment. Too often, the two refs call the same game in different ways: many times you'll see a ref call a penalty when he's a hundred feet from the offending play, while the ref five feet away detects nothing wrong. More germane to the topic at hand, an extra ref just means one more body on the ice...and with the speed of the modern game, I think there are too many bodies as it is.

A larger ice surface makes sense whether we nix the second ref or not. We have a model for this: the international game is played on a rink that is 13 feet wider than the one the NHL currently uses. Unfortunately, adoption of an international rink means knocking out the first few rows of $$$$ing seats in every arena, which in turn means it'll never happen.

So if we're stuck with a North American rink, maybe we need to look at four skaters a side instead of five. Yeah, I'm sure the NHL Player's Association will okay that.

I keep coming back to the culture of the game. It needs to change. Perhaps hockey could steal a page from soccer's playbook: a red card in soccer means instant ejection and your team has to play a man short for the rest of the game. Imagine that in hockey. Guaranteed loss. Your coach would kill you if you were still alive after your teammates had a go.

I love hockey. It's the fastest team sport in the world and played properly it's an absolute joy to watch. But I've had enough of the goonery. I'm pretty sure Max Pacioretty feels the same way.