Aside from
the headlines about the crowd of more than 105,000 who packed into Michigan
Stadium on January 1 to watch the 2014 Winter Classic, I doubt there’s been a
more talked about moment in the National Hockey League season than the shocking
display of violence and stupidity that we saw to round out the
passionately-celebrated Hockey Day in Canada out in Vancouver on Saturday
night.
For those
who might’ve been living under a hockey rock for the last few days, Calgary’s
trip west to visit Vancouver on Saturday night resulted in 152 penalty minutes
inside the first 0:02 of the contest after Flames coach Bob Hartley apparently
lost his mind and decided to start his fourth line, including noted agitator,
Brian McGrattan. Now, a coach only does this for one reason. He wants to stir
up trouble right from the outset, and, boy, didn’t he get his wish!
Canucks
coach John Tortorella followed suit, as he had to, putting out his group of
grind/enforcer-type players, led by noted goon Tom Sestito, who has been in the
headlines quite a bit recently. He knew what he was being forced to invite,
just as Hartley knew damn well what he was trying to instigate.
The result
was a mindless line brawl off the face-off. Every player on the ice, goalies
excluded, paired off with an opposition player and went at it, the referees
helpless, the crowd stunned. It was quite a debut for Vancouver’s Kellan Lain
who found himself staring his first career NHL game, and then, seconds later,
had a towering man named Kevin Westgarth in a red Calgary jersey trying to
rearrange his face.
Look, I’ve
long been an advocate of keeping fighting as a part of the NHL, because of the
way it provides a deterrent to most players, the most obvious rationale being
that a cheap-shot on a star player is likely going to earn you a chance to be
pummelled by a towering enforcer with arms as long as telegraph poles the very
next shift their coach can get his guy onto the ice with you. I like that
aspect, the on-ice policing of unsportsmanlike play. It’s why there’s rarely
headlines about cheap shots and otherwise dirty play.
Fighting
can also be used as a way to change the momentum of a game. I’ve lost track of
how many times I’ve seen a home team looking sluggish on the ice in front of a packed
but subdued arena before one of their players drops the gloves and goes at it.
Not only does it energise the players, it often does the same to the crowd, and
suddenly you’ve got a whole new game. I like to see that, too.
What I
don’t like to see is what happened on Saturday night in Vancouver. Sure, the
Canucks and the Flames might be rivals, but there’s a difference between two
guys on the ice reacting after a series of niggling plays to the contrived and
ridiculous brawl off the face-off. That did nothing to advance either the
pro-fighting argument nor the image of hockey. In Australia, you rarely see NHL
highlights unless it’s a brawl. No wonder so many people snidely remark that
shooting the puck is only an afterthought, something to do to space out the
fights.
For mine,
blame must be heaped fairly and squarely on the shoulders of Calgary coach Bob
Hartley. There was absolutely no – sane – reason that he could give as to why
he felt the need to start his fourth liners. Especially not when he knew what
sort of a reaction that move would elicit from his counterpart, Tortorella. It
set entirely the wrong tone for the game, and you have to imagine that Hartley
intended for his players to go out there and swing their fists from the outset.
It was a brain explosion of the highest order.
People have
criticised Tortorella for not defusing the situation by starting a different
sort of line, but at what cost? Icing a line featuring his star players, the
Sedin twins, would have been a sort of suicide. When you see the opposition
coach’s line-up – the road team is required to submit their line-up ahead of
the home team – is all fourth-line goons, it doesn’t take a genius to know
what’s going to happen next, does it?
So what is
Tortorella to do? Watch the Sedin boys get plastered against the glass by a player
like McGrattan and risk much, if not all of Vancouver’s season. No, way. That
would be another brain explosion. Tortorella did the only thing he could do. He
matched fire with fire to fight fire with fire, and the Canucks fourth-liners
gave a good account of themselves. If they didn’t win their bouts, they
certainly weren’t disgraced.
Tortorella,
of course, was furiously unhappy. In the aftermath of the fights, he climbed
down to the edge of the bench, leaned across the small section between the
benches, through and past cameramen and the on-ice report for CBC, and it
didn’t take a lip-reader to understand what he was saying to the Flames bench.
Of course, television turned off it’s microphones, but that didn’t help.
Notoriously
fiery at the best of times, Tortorella was about as irate as I’ve ever seen
him, and it continued in the first period, when the Canucks coach, apparently
not happy with what he heard back from the Calgary coaches on the bench, tried
to force his way into the Flames dressing room at the conclusion of the first
period, but the appearance of McGrattan, Westgarth and some others doubtless
convinced Tortorella that, on this occasion, discretion was the better part of
valor.
Okay, admittedly,
not the smartest move ever, and Tortorella probably regrets that now, but not
unusual in the heat of the moment. The guy wanted some answers, though he
didn’t go about getting them in the right way. If I was in his position, so
would I. One might reasonable argue, though, that nothing Hartley and his team
of assistants could say would adequately explain their moment(s) of madness.
Consequently,
Tortorella has been suspended fifteen days/six games without pay. To be honest,
he probably deserved that, and he probably understands it, too, but what gets
me is that Hartley, the guy who started this entire mess, gets off with a
comparative slap on the wrist. His fine, $25,000, is barely anything worth
mentioning.
Interestingly
– or absurdly – the Calgary President of Hockey Operations, Brian Burke, a guy
who I had more respect for yesterday than today, released a statement saying
that he is “perplexed” by the fine.
Really? It
was Hartley’s actions that led directly to this blight on the game – a blight
that hockey fans are still talking about three days after it happened. I won’t
argue that Tortorella didn’t deserve some sort of suspension, though I think
fifteen days is a little much. Yes, storming towards the other camp’s locker
room wasn’t smart, but Hartley at least deserves something similar. After all,
without his icing of the fourth line to start the game, there likely isn’t the
scenes like we saw late on Saturday night.
You know
what, I’m perplexed, too. Perplexed that the NHL has made their adjudication in
this fashion, without benching Hartley for at least a few games. Call that sort
of punishment a deterrent, call it well-deserved, call it both of the above,
call it whatever you want.
Let’s get
real for a second here: twenty-five large isn’t going to trouble Hartley all
that much. He’s making a small fortune to coach in Calgary. What the League is
basically saying is that you can set the stage for a monumental brawl, one
that’s given the entire sport a black eye, and twenty-five K is all you get
levied by way of punishment. Hardly a deterrent there.
As bad as
things were on the ice on Saturday night, the NHL front office’s strange
handling of the situation – just when some public relations savvy might’ve come
in handy – has made it all seem a whole lot worse.
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