It was the end-of-year party for our oldtimers hockey club at a pub in town. After some wings, some beer and a lot of laughs, we got down to the serious stuff of discussing the game we love. And it didn’t take long, before the elephant in the room emerged.
“What’re they going to do about fighting in hockey?”
Somebody said, “Nothing.” Somebody else said, “The NHL will never do anything because it draws fans.” Most said at rep and junior levels, the parents are the problem. Another blamed bad coaching. One said he knew a way to stop it. But most of us just threw up our hands, as if to say nobody’s going to do anything about it anyway.
That all changed a week ago during a hockey telecast, when Jennifer Botterill, a three-time Olympic champion and Sportsnet analyst, challenged the views of male panelist, Jamal Mayers, a former NHL player, about “getting even” in hockey. What sparked the debate?
During a New Year’s Eve NHL game, Ryan Hartman of the Minnesota Wild and the Winnipeg Jets’ Cole Perfetti came together in a face-off. Hartman intentionally ripped his stick up into the face of Perfetti, cutting him, as payback for an apparent Jets’ cross-check on the Wild’s Kirill Kaprizov in a game the day before. Hartman was penalized and then fined $4,400 for the infraction.
But the real showdown occurred when Jamal Mayers, who played 915 games in the NHL with five different teams during his career, tried to rationalize the incident. “Hartman is (saying) you’re not going to go after our star player,” Mayers said in the Sportsnet broadcast. “It’s not about fighting. To me, sending a message is important.”
In other words, Botterill retorted, highsticking is acceptable because revenge has to be exacted in the NHL? “I don’t think that’s selling your game for your biggest stars, your skilled players coming up. You’re saying, ‘Get ready because this could happen to you at any point.’ And you’re OK with that?”
Hockey belligerence has come and mostly gone in 50 years. There were times such as the 1970s when the Phildelphia Flyers, a.k.a. the Broad Street Bullies won games by intimidation. Then in the 1980s, the Edmonton Oilers used speed and European-style finesse to win their five Stanley Cups in six years.
I know. Some will say the only reason Wayne Gretzky excelled was because Dave Semenko was his enforcer – making sure that anybody who took a run at the star got a taste of it back. Well, I covered the Oilers’ home games for a full season in Edmonton, and I think I saw Semenko fight at the Northlands Coliseum once, and Gretzky’s welfare had nothing to do with it.
Jamal Mayers represents a significant segment of NHL hockey fans who believe that the league and its owners should leave the sport alone, that the key elements of the game – speed, size and physical intensity – are what make it great.
Like Don Cherry, they say “rock’em sock’em” players will always be there. That group, like Mayers, often says, “When we get into the playoffs there is an element of meanness … out there. And if you don’t like that kind of hockey, then maybe you don’t like playoff hockey. This isn’t archaic?”
“Yes it is,” Botterill interrupted. “There’s a difference between tough and physical and cheap and dirty. And to me (what Hartman did) is cheap and dirty.”
I personally don’t think NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman wants to clamp down on fighting; quite the opposite. I think he views it as a means of drawing more fans through turnstiles in lucrative U.S. markets where people will really never understand the intricacies of hockey, but will always pay to see a rumble on the ice.
By the way, if you want to end fighting in the NHL, one of my hockey buddies says it’s easy. He recommends the rugby model. In rugby, even so much as the hint of a punch and a player is red-carded/ejected from the game. His/her team plays the rest of the game short one player.
“Have an NHL team down a player for the rest of the game,” he said, “and fighting will stop overnight.”
It’s worth noting that the first 11 days of this month have featured the birth of the Women’s Professional Hockey League. All WPHL games have already sold out. The players make less, play harder and don’t fight. What does that tell us?
I agree wholeheartedly with Jennifer Botterill’s insight, keep the toughness, penalize the cheap shots, and save a beautiful game.