by Kevin Fournier – November 5, 2007
On Friday, Boston Bruins’ GM Peter Chiarelli reported on the condition of Patrice Bergeron and rightfully tore a strip off the talking heads, mostly in the Canadian media, who have been suggesting that Bergeron was partly to blame for his injury. You can check the evidence for yourself on YouTube:
Bergeron’s head isn’t down. He was making a routine play to collect the puck, and Philly’s defenseman Randy Jones was making an illegal but, sad to say, also fairly routine hit from behind. If you’re a hockey fan, this is exactly the kind of play that makes you want to throw up in your mouth. Nine times out of ten it would have resulted in a two-minute penalty, and nothing more said; this time, it derailed, if not ended, the career of a 22-year-old kid, one of the most talented and likeable young players in the league. Randy Jones is the third young Philadelphia player this season to receive a suspension for going for another player’s head.
Bobby Clarke, the man best known for deliberately injuring Valery Kharlamov in ’72, officially stepped down as Flyers GM last year, but he still maintains his influence in the organization. All three players were brought in by Clarke originally; all three were young, marginal players trying to earn or keep a roster spot on the big team. The other two, Steve Downie and Jesse Boulerice, were players who had black records in the junior leagues. Boulerice had a history of uncontrolled violence; Downie, in addition to various on-ice issues, was the central figure in a notorious and nauseating hazing story. Clarke drafted them anyway, despite their histories of violence – I won’t go so far as to say “because of”.
Randy Jones is a different story. Undrafted, he was signed as a free agent by the Flyers in 2003 and has spent the last three years bouncing back and forth between the minors and the NHL. He wasn’t head-hunting; he almost certainly had no thought of injuring Bergeron. He was merely trying to impress his coaches; he was “playing hard.”
When the NHL came back from their lock-out year, they brought in a number of changes to improve what had become a sluggish, trap-happy and low-scoring game, with a paucity of highlight-reel plays – the bread and butter of any sports league in the age of the fifteen-second attention span.
Most of the changes have been highly successful. Purists, arithmeticians and goalies might dislike the shootout, but the majority of fans love it. Narrowing the neutral zone, adding the stretch pass and moving back the goals were smart, simple moves to increase offense. But everyone knew that the most significant change would have to come, not from changing or adding rules, but actually enforcing the existing ones. No more hooks, no more clutching; no more would defenseman be allowed to drape themselves over opposing players, or mug people at the goal-mouth.
It worked. Scoring went up and has stayed up. Pre-lockout, a one-goal lead in the third period was virtually insurmountable; now a three-goal lead is hardly safe. An influx of insanely talented young offensive players, spearheaded by Sidney Crosby and Alexander Ovechkin (and including Bergeron), together with new rules that allowed them to showcase their skills, has made for a far more exciting and entertaining sport. Add the rising value of the Canadian dollar, and you have a league in far better shape than it deserves to be, only a few scant years after a lockout that should have killed it.
One of the rule changes they didn’t make, though – despite almost everyone calling for it – was something called “no-touch icing.” For you non-hockey fans, “icing” is when a player shoots the puck all the way from his zone to the other end of the rink – basically a desperation play to gain a temporary respite. In international hockey, the whistle blows as soon as the puck crosses the far line – no one has to touch it. In the NHL, if the team that iced the puck can out-skate the other team and touch the puck first, no whistle blows. This makes for some exciting races – exciting and stupidly dangerous, as two men skate at top speed, one right on top of another, directly into the boards. Seperated shoulders and broken ankles are not uncommon; there have been career-ending injuries, as in the case of Mark Tinordi.
The fact that the NHL decided not to make this rule change – refusing to compromise any “excitement” in order to prevent stupid, pointless injuries, is symptomatic of the problem (and players themselves, via the Competition Committee and the union, played a major role in that non-decision). The ice is the same size as it was a hundred years ago, but players are bigger, faster, and far more athletic. What’s more, the equipment they now wear, the shoulder pads and elbow pads in particular, are like storm trooper gear. Getting hit in the head by today’s elbow pads or shoulder pads is like getting hit with a shovel, swung at full strength. The pre-lockout trap game, the clutching-and-grabbing, was making hockey deadly boring; but with it eliminated, players are colliding into each other at such punishing velocity, it’s deadly, plain and simple.
Patrice Bergeron came within a hair of being killed on ice. It’s easy to attack the Phillies for being Broadstreet Bullies, and point the finger at GMS like Bobby Clarke (and Anaheim’s Brian Burke) for promulgating a very Canadian culture of on-ice thuggery. It’s easy to attack these things, and say they need to be taken out of the game. It’s much harder, if you’re a hockey-lover, to face the fact that Bergeron’s injury was largely a result of the game as we want to see it played: at literally breakneck speed.
Kevin Fournier is a Winnipeg-based writer. His first novel, Sandbag Shuffle, is published by Thistledown Press. He also blogs at Who Put Back the Clock?