MONTREAL — It’s a strange world, friends, when those of us who have no real stake in the matter are continually outraged by the lenient sentences applied by the NHL home office to headhunters and serial miscreants while the people who are directly affected by the issue couldn’t seem to care less, and we are not — are not — talking about Sixth Avenue in New York or Bay Street in Toronto.
Of all the absurdities, the latest is the whining from Boston general manager Peter Chiarelli about the “stiff” four-game suspension the Bruins’ Daniel Paille received for his Rule 48 blindside hit to the head that broke Stars forward Raymond Sawada’s nose Thursday night.
Here’s the GM of a team whose first-line center’s career was ruined, simply ruined, by a blindside hit to the head last season, yet 11 months later, Chiarelli is steamed because a guy on his team who gets less than 11 minutes per is going to have to sit out four games for targeting the head of another team’s player, the lesson of Marc Savard be damned or forgotten.
But that’s pretty much it, isn’t it? This time it was another team’s player. Meaning it was the other team’s problem.
There’s more, however, for Slap Shots has been told the NHLPA, at least as the union has been represented on the competition committee, has consistently argued against punishments that fit the crime of head-targeting.
Indeed, we were told by a well-placed source the PA only signed off on Rule 48 last summer on the condition that VP Colin Campbell not impose what the players referred to as “super suspensions,” for those guilty of coming laterally to apply blindside hits to the head.
Which is why suspensions, even for repeat offenders, are generally fewer than five games.
Under those circumstances, even acknowledging the amount of space and the tens of thousands of words we have devoted to excoriating Campbell, commissioner Gary Bettman and the league for not applying harsh suspensions to headhunters, the athletes are now marked as co-conspirators in the league’s laissez-faire attitude to the felonious among them.
We can only surmise the players have taken this stance because they are more concerned with protecting their brethren’s pocketbooks than they are with protecting their brains. They are more concerned with players avoiding the loss of pay that would become substantial under double-digit suspensions than they are with ensuring players don’t lose their cognitive ability.
This is going to be an interesting issue by which to gauge Donald Fehr as executive director of the NHLPA. For if there is a stain on Fehr’s record leading the MLBPA, it is that union’s leadership’s failure to address and protect the health issue of its players relating to steroids and other PEDs.
That studied and calculated indifference was less about privacy issues — let’s get real — than it was about money, about a rising tide of home runs and power stats lifting all yachts, uh, contracts.
We don’t know yet what, if any impact, the baseball union’s stiff resistance to testing will prove to have on the long term health of its players. We don’t, however, have to wait a decade to recognize the devastating effects concussions have on the health and lives of hockey players concussed by blows to the head.
All the journalists can present all the outrage we can muster seven days a week, 52 weeks a year about the NHL’s broken justice system. No matter.
For the only method by which this will change is if the people whose careers and health are at stake attack this issue with an eye to the greater good rather to their own selfish interests.
CBA negotiations are a year or so away. But hits to the head and the fallout from the increasing attention paid to the concussion issue are a matter of clear and present danger Fehr and his new leadership group — that will include Mathieu Schneider — must address immediately.
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Difficult to discern which was more idiotic, Rick DiPietro
‘s decision to engage Matt Cooke
and fight Brent Johnson
in Pittsburgh with less than 17 seconds to go in a 3-0 loss in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, or Jack Capuano
‘s defense of the goaltender in which the coach praised DiPietro’s “courage.”
It is, however, simply another example of the Islanders enabling the self-destructive instincts of their fragile goaltender, who admitted he ignited the chain of events that will sideline him for four-to-six weeks with a broken face because he was frustrated.
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So Phil Kessel
was the last man sitting at the All Star Fantasy Draft, which seemed to tick off Toronto loyalists no end, and whose howls of outrage only served to draw more attention to the plight of No. 81 and GM Brian Burke’s trade that brought him to the Maple Leafs.
If it hadn’t been Kessel, there would have been no stigma attached to going last in a draft in which players were selected as much because of their relationships with the team captains as anything related to value.
Martin Biron
, meanwhile, had this to say:
“I’d rather be picked last than watch it on television,” said the Rangers’ goaltender, who watched it on television.
Finally, we see that Chris Simon
has won the KHL All-Star accuracy skills competition. Must have been the practice on Ryan Hollweg
‘s head.