National Post (National Edition)
Laine hit well within the rules
Patrik Laine has accomplished a lot of firsts this season, but the first superstar of the modern Winnipeg Jets era could have done without this one.
Laine suffered his first NHL concussion over the weekend and like his impact on the Jets lineup so far this season it wasn’t exactly subtle.
Like many of the Finn’s goals, the hit that sidelined him indefinitely was highlight-reel material, a thunderous open-ice collision you don’t often see in today’s NHL.
That’s too bad, because it was a dandy display of body contact, one of the things that make hockey worth watching.
If you don’t have a rooting interest, you enjoy the kind of hit Buffalo’s Jake McCabe delivered on the 18-yearold Laine, a momentum-changer that delivered a jolt through both benches.
Not even Laine’s teammates want to see that kind of open-ice hit removed from the game.
“That’s impossible,” Drew Stafford said Monday. “You might as well just take out hitting. Like women’s hockey, where there’s not really hitting, but you can rub out and bump and a check is a penalty. That’s never going to happen. At least not in my lifetime.
“It’s a physical game. It’s a contact sport. It’s going to happen. Look at football. Are they going to play flag football?” Of course they’re not. Football players don’t want to, just like NHL players don’t want to play noncontact hockey.
If you try to curb open-ice hitting only, well, good luck with that.
“There would be so many grey areas,” Mathieu Perreault said. “What would be an open-ice hit and what wouldn’t be? How far do you have to be from the boards? I don’t see it.”
This from two skilled players who could only benefit from the removal of openice hitting.
“It would actually give me a little more freedom in the neutral zone to grab a pass without being as careful as I would knowing that I could get hit,” Perreault said.
Still, it wouldn’t be hockey without it, he said.
The Jets used to be the hitters. It was a key reason they earned their only playoff spot two years ago.
Since then, they’ve become the targets. The fast, skilled guys other teams want to slow down.
IT’S A PHYSICAL GAME. IT’S A CONTACT SPORT.
Laine was stopped dead in his tracks, Saturday, the hit taking as much of an emotional toll on his team as anything.
The kind of hit you’d like to see Dustin Byfuglien deliver on a more regular basis, although that’s a fine, highrisk line to walk.
“You don’t see it very often for good reasons,” Jets head coach Paul Maurice said. “It’s very, very difficult to time that. The cost of missing that hit is an odd-man break.”
The cost of removing that kind of hit from the game, nobody is willing to pay.
“It’s part of the game,” Maurice said. “And we don’t like any injuries, regardless of how they happen. But unless you turn this into a noncontact sport — and I feel fairly progressive in how I view the sport — we’ve done everything we possibly can to take care of these players and their heads.
“But this is a very fast game with big men in a confined area, there’s going to be collisions in this game.”
Seems all the Jets’ fast, skilled players agree.
“I don’t think it’s something that you can take out of the game,” Nik Ehlers said. “It’s been part of the game for so long. I’ve never made a hit like that so I don’t know how it feels. I’m probably never going to make a hit like that.”
But if he’s not paying attention, he might receive one.
Which brings us to the one lesson Laine will learn from this.
He may not need one minute of instruction on how to shoot or pass or score. But he just learned that on the small North American ice, Rule No. 1 is keeping your head up.
“Looking at the replay, it’s a bit Patty’s responsibility to take a peek,” Perreault said. “If you’re going to take a puck and skate the other way without knowing what’s coming at you, then it’s a little bit your own fault.”
That’s one hard lesson.