Liam's Lament

Another week another punch, another week, another stretcher case. Such is life in the NHL. Not a whole lot different if at all from the past, less frequency if anything but still – the collective conscious of the non-hockey fans and the mind set of some in the main stream media have raised a verbal fist of anger at hockey for it’s seemingly blind-eye to these barbaric acts. Please hold my calls while I dab my eyes with Kleenex.

We didn’t have to wait long for the next suspension after Chris Simon’s melt down. Jordin Tootoo took care of that with one, albeit lucky shot, to the incoming Stephane Robidas. Tootoo has amassed nearly 30 fighting majors at this juncture of his brief NHL career. He is no shrinking violet and Canadian hockey fell in love with this guy during the 2003 World Junior Championships in Halifax. From game one against Sweden right through the gold medal tilt against the Russians he hit everything that moved and this only a short while after his brother had committed suicide so the story wrote itself and he took care of business on the ice. In my opinion he was the most effective, truculent player I had seen in a Team Canada sweater since Eric Lindros first burst on the scene and Wendel Clark was in his prime. Granted both of them had much more skill however it should be noted that Tootoo scored over 100 goals in his junior A career and over 200 points to go along with his 874 pim’s. He had been a regular part of the Nashville landscape this season and his five game suspension was too long in my opinion. Given how he plays the game, hit first ask questions later, Robidas had to know he was going to engage a very willing combatant. And this after yet another ‘clean’ hit of a megastar, this time Mike Modano. What really baffles me is the exclusion of Modano from most of the discussion even though he smacked Tootoo in the back with his stick right after Jordin caught Robidas on the button with a wild right hand. It reminded me of the situation involving Scott Niedermayer who chopped Peter Worrell right over the head with his stick not long after the Todd Bertuzzi-Steve Moore incident. Niedermayer received a ten game suspension for that act which if anything shows even the superstars can ‘lose it’ in the game of hockey yet you’d be hard pressed to read any account of that now. In the annals of hockey history a number of the top players have been suspended for brutal stick work but throw one punch and it’s the anti-fighting activists who lobby so passionately they make the anti-Vietnam protests look like a Boy Scout meeting.

Next up was Todd Fedoruk of the Flyers taking it on the chin, literally from Colton Orr of the New York Rangers. Fedoruk should not have been in this game much less back in the league after his destruction at the hands of Derek Boogaard earlier this year. Sometimes a guy just has to know when to hang it up and it’s my hope that this is the case with Fedoruk at this time even though thankfully he does not appear to have been hurt badly in the Orr fight so who knows – he may and the Flyers might just allow him to continue at some point.

Fedoruk earns 450,000.00 US a year. How many of you reading this right now make that kind of money? He has been a pro for seven years, more than 300 games and of course his contract is guaranteed. If he decides to play again and fight again and gets hurt again – that’s his decision. It’s not yours, it’s not mine nor should it be.

This is what you backward thinking neophytes need to understand about the game. When you play pro sports you assume a risk. There is an inherent risk of getting hurt no matter what sport you play. Hockey is vastly different. With the speed of the game and the collisions of bodies at more than thirty miles an hour you also have players carrying weapons. A hockey stick. Contact with the stick in some way, shape or form even sometimes when deemed to be clean – has led to some of the most drastic consequences that you can imagine. No sense revisiting history, most of you have heard it and know it. Unless you have felt the sting of a slash, the spear of the blade, the shaft of a cross check, the butt end, you are incapable of forming an opinion of what is right in terms of retaliation, retribution or otherwise. These men know the risks going in and for more than 100 years these men doled out their own form of punishment to those who crossed the line. For the past 10-15 the rule changes have made these reprisal acts a moot point. For the most part they only exist now in the most heinous way, McSorley on Brashear, Bertuzzi on Moore, Niedermayer on Worrell and Simon on Hollweg. And the list goes on. Several media out of Toronto are championing their editorial right with this grandiose statement, ‘somebody is going to get killed,’ Yes guys, in fact players have already been killed on the ice. From stick work, from skate blades and one death already recorded in the NHL. Bill Masterton died in 1968 after striking his head on the ice. All anybody has to do is google this and you’ll find it. Not that hard but that would deflate some of these pompous asses. In their typical callous listen-to-me, know-it-all attitude, they of course don’t mention this. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. If you are that much concerned about the player’s safety and the elimination of anything, absolutely anything that could be construed as life threatening then lobby for a non-contact league with protection from head to toe, no slap shots and what the heck, while we’re at it let’s not keep score because that could only incite nastiness late in a game that’s not winnable.

Sorry for the length folks but this is a serious issue. It’s serious enough for me to say that I have a dream. I have a dream of an NHL that I watched as a young boy growing up. This is an NHL of accountability, of respect, with dazzling plays and incredible goals and yes, controlled and sometimes uncontrolled violence. It’s my opinion that no amount of legislation or punitive measures will eliminate all acts of violence in the NHL just like the non-fighting rule in the NBA has not eliminated some of the wildest out of control moments you’ll ever see in sport or the endless bean balls and bench brawls in baseball.

Does anybody know the name Eric Medlen? He was a drag racer. He passed away on March 23, 2007 – that’s three days ago folks, three days ago. He is the 127th person do die in a race car of some sort since 1980. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_racing_drivers_who_died_in_racing_crashes) I simply cannot believe the callousness and wash-your-hand-of-it mentality of you the know-it-all who wants to dictate how hockey should be played but who obviously cares nothing about the endless carnage and violence in other sports. To me that’s gutless. Please leave my sport alone, you have no business even watching it and clearly are unable to suggest any cognitive solutions.

Liam Maguire

After viewing several weeks worth of late hits and cheap shots NHL disciplinarian Colin Campbell finally put his stamp on this current season with a 25 game suspension (minimum) to New York Islanders Chris Simon for his slash to the face of New York Rangers Ryan Hollweg. It was an appropriate call in my view given the severity of the stick work however it should not be extended beyond that like Marty McSorley’s and Todd Bertuzzi’s nor was it by far as bad as others in the history of the NHL. Incidentally, why the main stream media don’t report this is beyond me but the longest suspension handed down in NHL history for an on ice incident was to Boston’s Bill Coutu in 1927. Coutu flattened both game officials during a wild bench clearing brawl at the conclusion of the 1927 Stanley Cup final between Boston and the Ottawa Senators. Jerry Laflamme and Billy Bell were the two officials and Coutu, in plain view of league President Frank Calder, drilled both officials with punches and had to be restrained from doing more damage than that. Calder saw enough from that action to suspend Coutu for life from the NHL. Coutu toiled in the minors for two seasons and in 1929 his life time ban was lifted but he was through with hockey at that point and never did play in the NHL again. Somewhat similar to the Marty McSorley story.

If you are a fan of the game though, there is a major cause for concern. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, what we have now is a vastly different culture of hitting through out the league. Shifts are short, players can all skate, they are all well built and equipment is light yet has increased in size and in the capability of it to hurt. When you are hit anywhere with today’s elbow pads and shoulder pads you feel it unlike ‘back in the day’ when the soft padding and small yet solid enough shoulder cup was all that prevented us from injury to those upper parts of our body. Anybody with children playing or if you are playing yourself you know that the equipment from our youth has been replaced by hard plastic that has been the cause for many of the concussions we see today. I still use my shoulder pads that I wore in Juvenile and college hockey, 25-30 years ago and yes they are old and old looking but compared to the Robocop type of equipment of today they are archaic. Funny thing is I played full contact until I was 24 years old and the only concussion I suffered was as a result of a shot to my face, not from being hit with any type of check which I was many, many times. I digress.

The culture of hitting today is predatory by nature and it’s conducted primarily by a type of player that has flourished in today’s NHL with its lack of accountability and lack of respect. Players like Ryan Hollweg are making a career of playing 7-8 minutes a game and by going out in 40 second shifts to hit anything that moves. The hit on Chris Simon should have been penalized. Who knows, had one of the officials been signaling a penalty perhaps that might have been enough to stem Simon’s rage. Then again Hollweg skated right back at him I suspect because he knew damn well he had a tiger by the tail and was hoping for a retaliatory strike. Boy did he get that!

Folks, this type of reaction by Chris Simon will happen again. Probably sooner rather than later. If you have never played contact hockey you are incapable of knowing the extreme venom that wells inside of you in a very brief moment where in a 20 or 30 second period you would commit the most heinous act on the ice because you simply ‘lose it.’ I guarantee you that somewhere here in my home town of Ottawa or the Valley, somewhere every single night there is some sort of confrontation between two or more players because of a perceived or real transgression. And this is in men’s leagues where everybody is getting up to go to work the next day. Multiply that by 1000 to get the feeling in a pro game where you are paid to play – where you are the elite of the elite even the enforcers and where any little thing in a game can have consequences on you, your team or your season. These guys are already on the razor’s edge and their very livelihood depends on it.

This is why players HAVE to be allowed to police themselves to some extent. We’ve had three major situations in the past three weeks. Chris Neil on Chris Drury, Cam Janssen on Tomas Kaberle and now Chris Simon on Ryan Hollweg. None of the original hits were penalized yet I can tell you time and time again – there will be repercussions from these types of hits at the NHL level and their darn well should be! Whether you call them all clean or whatever – they are dirty shots that you would not have seen in the NHL 15-20 years ago. If you threw a shot like that in that time period or before you knew very well that somebody or more likely everybody would be gunning for you immediately and because of that you picked your spot. You rarely saw a player hit in a vulnerable position. You almost never saw a blindside hit. You virtually never saw hitting from behind. These are all products of the ‘new’ NHL. Welcome to it. It sucks. It’s brutal. It’s spawned a new sort of gutless player which is ironic to say because these perpetrators of these hits in most cases are pretty tough lads in their own right but believe me when I say this – if you think I’m wrong ask somebody you know who knows the game from ‘back in the day’ these types of hits would not happen just a few short decades ago. The NHL needs to lose the instigator rule immediately and they need to eliminate gratuitous shots to the head. I don’t care that Chris Neil said he ‘hits to hurt.’ That’s fine, he’s young. When he’s older he’ll see how stupid a thing that was to say but for now please allow the players the ability to bring the respect back into the game. Believe me, they will, in a hurry and we’ll have a much better, much cleaner league for it.


Liam Maguire

A couple of months ago while appearing on the Ottawa Senators pre game show on radio station TEAM 1200, TSN’s Bob McKenzie hit the nail right on the head with regards to the body checks or more to the point the type of body checks that are being dished out by today’s NHL players. To quote, “the culture of hitting is different now than what it was 15, 20 or 25 years ago,” exclaimed McKenzie. And he was bang on ladies and gentlemen. In today’s game a player will take an opportunity to finish a hit no matter what the situation or the vulnerability of the player on the receiving end. Not so ‘back in the day.’ If a co-captain of any team had been hit the way Chris Drury was by Chris Neil you would have had an all out bench clearing brawl in five seconds in any era of the NHL prior to 1990. Chris Neil would have known that going in and perhaps, like his predecessors he would have held off smoking Drury, perhaps not. Neil is a physical player who enjoys it, has been quoted that he likes to hit to hurt and my guess is that he’s more than willing to be as accountable as anybody wants to try and make him. Having said that, I whole heartedly endorse Lindy Ruff’s response in sending out his tough guys – I would have done it a bit differently however. I simply would have waited for Chris Neil to finish serving his major for fighting Stafford and would have instructed Andrew Peters and Co. to go get him then rather than try and get something going with Dany Heatley, Jason Spezza, etc.

Naturally there was quite a bit of verbiage regarding this situation. Here’s my view of the whole thing. If I were the Buffalo owner I would have offered Lindy Ruff a contract extension immediately following the game. The longest serving coach currently in the NHL made an immediate statement with the players he sent out on the next shift. His responsibility as a coach is to his team and his organization and his response was noted by everybody in that organization. Further more neither Adam Mair or Andrew Peters continued to fight Jason Spezza or Dany Heatley after they showed they were less than interested in throwing the knuckles and good for all parties on that front. This is why Peters made a beeline for Ottawa goalie Ray Emery after his easy dismissal of Martin Biron. Everybody in hockey knows of Emery’s reputation and he was not the first nor will he be the last goaltender to fight a position player in the NHL. Still, somebody, anybody should have jumped in on Emery’s behalf as Peter’s was winging the right hands in even though very few if any actually landed. The optics of the whole situation from the Neil hit right through the Peters-Emery tilt was not good for the Senators or their fans.

Part two. The rematch. I was at that game, three rows off the ice. Brian McGratton was worth the price of admission in the warm up alone. His tilt with Peters was preceded by a near Peters-Redden tussle that undoubtedly was not going to erupt into something major but with McGratton on the ice it had no chance to really start anyway and that’s why you want him out there. McGratton took a huge shot early in that fight and did not go down. In fact he came back to get the decision which was followed just minutes later by a Chris Neil –Adam Mair bout clearly won by Neil. Ottawa blew a 4-1 and a 5-3 lead in that game but hung on for a 6-5 victory but who cares? Lindy Ruff was quoted as saying after the Thursday game, ‘that he could care less if they had of lost the game 10-1,’ the team made a statement, he initiated it, and he endorsed it and fully supported it. His counter part Bryan Murray responded in kind on Saturday night by dressing McGratton and it was a classic. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife in the building and to be honest it felt like being in the Montreal Forum on a Saturday night as they were getting ready to play Boston or Philly in the 1970’s. That’s what hockey is all about. Emotion, instant reaction, accountability, nastiness and sometimes uncontrolled violence. All tree huggers please exit stage door left. Take your drinks with straws in them with you.

In an interview I did with Pierre Pilote several years ago he told me that he tried at least once a game to hit a guy so hard that he’d have to be carried off on a stretcher. Most of you probably never heard of Mr. Pilote. He won the Stanley Cup in 1961 with Chicago and was a three time recipient of the James Norris Trophy as the top defenseman in the NHL. He was an incredible defenseman. The very nature of hockey dictates that there are going to be flare-ups that sometimes are brutal in nature. What the league needs to realize is that in the anti septic makeover of the NHL they have eradicated almost all levels of respect and the very nature of their rule changes (instigator penalty, defensemen restricted in playing the body, retaliators penalized rather than original cheap shot artists) have contrived to create a terrible mess that will have at some point in the not to distant future a scene that will make the Todd Bertuzzi-Steve Moore incident look like a boy scout get together. Give the accountability back to the players. Penalize blind side hits to the head and let the defensemen play the body like they used to. Cam Janssen’s hit on Tomas Kaberle of the Leafs was a late hit and I have no problem with the suspension but again – if this were in the era I grew up watching and say that was the Flyers Dave Schultz hitting Montreal’s John Van Boxmeer with a late shot you would have had a war on your hands. Wait a minute…………that happened in 1974. In fact I have the incident on tape. Montreal historians point to that moment as the coming out party of Larry Robinson or the coming together of the organization that would go on to win four straight Stanley Cups. Buffalo personnel are making similar statements for their team’s reaction to the Drury hit by Chris Neil.

I love the skill players and all they bring to the game. I also love the fact that I grew up in a time when they could be protected by their peers. It was a better league and believe it or not a much cleaner league. Any comments, send ‘em on. Love to hear them.


Liam Maguire