LAW OF JUNGLE RULING HOCKEY — STILL
Darryl Sutter’s take on the outbreak of mean-spirited cheap shots in these Stanley Cup playoffs is he hopes all three teams on the ice learn from them — meaning the two opposing hockey clubs and the officials.
But really, there are four teams contributing to what San Jose coach Todd Mclellan has called this spring’s “borderline chaos.”
There are the competing sides, the on-ice officials . . . and the department of player safety, where Brendan Shanahan’s wheel of justice spins to life with each new atrocity — and where it stops, no one knows.
The first two teams wait for the third to react. The third waits for the fourth. The fourth hems and haws and punishes not for the crime, or even for the intent, but for the injury. And the first three go right on doing what they were doing, rolling the dice that the victim will get back up, and life will resume as before.
This is not, incidentally, any reflection on what happened at the Staples Center on Sunday, where the two team captains came together in a seminal moment: Los Angeles Kings rugged series hero Dustin Brown delivering a ferocious hit to unsuspecting Henrik Sedin in front of the Vancouver Canucks bench, leaving Sedin groping for breath or directions, or just someone to let him in the door.
Sedin, who’s already lost twin Daniel to a concussion — though the Canucks, down 0-3 in the series and facing an ignominious end to a Presidents’ Trophy season, say he will practise today — called Brown’s hit clean.
Vancouver coach Alain Vigneault basically said the same thing. And Sutter, the man of few words behind the Kings’ bench, concurred.
“I’ve seen it live, and in Technicolor,” he said Monday at the club’s El Segundo practice facility, when asked if he had viewed the replay. “It looks good in both.”
Across the NHL, reaction to the spate of suspendable offences in the opening few games of at least four playoff series — Philadelphia-pittsburgh most notably, but also Nashville-detroit, New York-Ottawa and St. Louis-san Jose — has been loud and sustained.
The Penguins, of all teams, have led the 16 playoff qualifiers to a total of 724 penalty minutes in the first 19 post-season games, the most since 2006 at this time, and as if to underline their frustration, have had more players called on Shanahan’s carpet for hearings than the Canucks have scored goals in the past two games.
Somewhere in the middle of all the head shots, sucker punches and intent-to-injure hits, though, lies a mostly forgotten fact: hockey is a physical game, and not every hit that hurts an opponent is dirty. Case in point: Brown’s on Sedin. “Hockey is still a contact sport. There’s hits that are going to be hard, and are going to hurt, but are still within the rules and that’s the line you gotta play on,” said Brown. “I mean, I got a good hit on (Henrik), a hard hit, and he stayed in the game. . . . It was probably a huge lift for them when he came back out of the dressing room.”
Vigneault said Monday, “I had a buddy tell me yesterday that a lot of that in the (Pittsburgh-philly) series looked like Boston versus us last year. Maybe some teams are trying to do what the champions did. It was successful, they won the Stanley Cup. We were one game away. Maybe, if we win, they’re trying to emulate us, with more skill. But Boston won it.”
Sutter disagrees. “The Philly-Pittsburgh series, when you look at it, it’s not a physical series. Not a lot of honest contact being made. It’s more after the whistle or what appears on TV to be borderline dirty plays,” he said.
Asked how this year’s mayhem level compared to when he played, Sutter said, “It’s a lot less now.” Outbreaks after whistles, even in warm-ups, were more common in his day, he said, adding much of the current outrage may be due to the omnipresence of TV cameras.
But some of the factors in the unruly behaviour are clear enough. There are more teams, requiring more players and more officials, and a lot of them wouldn’t have made the cut 20 or 30 years ago. Players make more money than ever, yet have less respect for one another’s livelihoods.
Sutter played before helmets were mandatory, and said taking head shots just wasn’t done.
But there is an ebb and flow to the cycles of all things in hockey. Right now, it looks like the law of the jungle out there. To a greater or lesser degree, it always has been.