NHL’s code of justice can break down
THORNTON SUSPENSION only continues the debate over role of enforcer
The National Hockey League’s 15-game suspension of Boston’s Shawn Thornton for attacking Pittsburgh defenceman Brooks Orpik in a Dec. 7 game will hardly be the last word in the sport’s endless soul-searching over the role of the enforcer. The debate is sure to continue the next time a player is injured in a fight or some other form of the game’s unique brand of frontier justice.
The suspension, announced Saturday, is tied for the league’s 13th longest for an on-ice incident. It is the second longest handed out by Brendan Shanahan, who became the NHL’s chief disciplinarian in June 2011. Despite having been in about 150 fights as an NHL player, Thornton had never been suspended.
“You’re playing in a war zone,” said Saul L. Miller, a sports psychologist based in Vancouver, who has worked with several NHL players, including enforcers like Tiger Williams and Donald Brashear.
“You feel something bad has been done to your player, and you’re going to do something bad back.”
The licence to retaliate is part of what some call the code among NHL tough guys, an intricate construct of unwritten rules that everyone seems to understand. Basically, the code demands that a player who delivers a questionable hit is subject to retaliation and is expected to accept a challenge to fight. But vigilante justice must be administered the correct way, so sucker punches and sneak attacks are forbidden.
It is an inherently flawed system that can break down, often with catastrophic consequences. It broke down when Marty McSorley clubbed Brashear over the head in 2000, and when Todd Bertuzzi attacked Steve Moore in 2004. And it broke down again Dec. 7, when Thornton attacked and injured Orpik.
Orpik had administered a hard hit to Thornton’s teammate Loui Eriksson 10 seconds into the game. Eriksson, who was just back from a concussion, was injured on the play. No penalty was called, and whether one should have been called is debatable.
Thornton challenged Orpik to fight several times in the next 10 minutes, but he refused. Orpik presumably did not want to put his team, which was missing two leading defencemen, at a further disadvantage.
But during a stoppage in play later in the first period, Thornton approached Orpik from behind and kicked his skates out so he fell back- ward. Thornton punched the fallen Orpik at least twice in the face, knocking him unconscious. Orpik was taken off the ice on stretcher and Thornton was ejected.
“It’s always my job to defend my teammates,” Thornton said, “but I’ve prided myself for a long time to stay within the lines. I can’t say I’m sorry enough.”
Miller, who said he believed there was a place in the game for fighting, said the role of enforcer required a high degree of self-discipline.
“It’s almost paradoxical,” he said, “because you have to step up in these moments of intense emotion, and yet to step up appropriately, you have to be somebody who has emotional control.”
Thornton knew he had violated the code. At 36, he is a widely liked, useful fourthliner who was a key member of two championship teams, the 2007 Anaheim Ducks and the 2011 Bruins.
But Thornton is such a proponent of the code that days before the Orpik episode, he told ESPN, “People could probably criticize that I’m a little too honourable.”
Advocates of the code said that if Orpik had fought, honour would have been satisfied and the situation would have been defused.
“Brooks Orpik should have dropped his gloves,” said the former enforcer Chris Nilan, echoing the feeling among many people in hockey. “The guy’s 6-2, 220. Drop your gloves the first time and fight him, and get it over with.”
But that system is based on controlled mayhem, and mayhem cannot always be controlled. In each of hockey’s most notorious vigilante cases this century, the victim — an unwilling combatant like Orpik — had defended himself in an earlier fight.
Before Boston’s McSorley clubbed Vancouver’s Brashear over the head in 2000, they had squared off with Brashear the winner. McSorley sought a rematch that Brashear, whose team was winning, did not want.
And before Vancouver’s Bertuzzi jumped Colorado’s Moore from behind in 2004 in retaliation for Moore’s hit on the Canucks’ captain, Markus Naslund, in an earlier game, Moore had been forced to fight Matt Cooke. Bertuzzi dropped Moore to the ice, breaking his neck and ending his career, after Moore declined to fight again.
Those events involved criminal charges but no jail time, and the Bertuzzi-Moore case is still in civil court. McSorley was suspended for one year but never played again; officially, he missed 23 games.
Bertuzzi was suspended indefinitely but was reinstated after the 2005-06 lockout; officially, he missed 20 games.