NHL’s caveman mentality hits a new level
At the end of the Week of Tom Sestito in Vancouver, John Tortorella was faced with a choice. At some point, he had been alerted to Calgary’s choices for a starting lineup: Kevin Westgarth, Brian McGrattan, Blair Jones, Alberta beef.
McGrattan has concussed Vancouver’s Andrew Alberts with a high hit back on Dec. 30, so maybe Flames coach Bob Hartley was just getting the revenge ritual out of the way early. Whatever. This was the brute squad, and Tortorella knows what that means.
So he put out his own muscle — as Sestito, dubbed a boxing hobo by Keith Olbermann of ESPN this week, poetically put it to reporters, “Torts told us they were starting their idiots over there, so we had to match that” — and presto, a brawl, the latest example of the NHL’s love for its caveman side. It’s stupid, but it happens.
What choice did Tortorella have, really? He could have put out the Sedins or Ryan Kesler and taken the chance that the Flames goon squad wouldn’t do something exceptionally stupid, but stupid appeared to be the order of the day.
Tortorella just did what NHL coaches do, and you could defend it. Well, aside from throwing out Canucks rookie and Oakville, Ont., native Kellen Lain, whose parents and brother flew in to see him play two seconds, fight, and get ejected along with seven other players. May they treasure their memories.
The rest of us were left to apportion blame, which starts with Hartley, who set this particular table, and who pretended never to have heard of tables afterwards.
“Those guys are playing well for us,” he told reporters, “we had absolutely zero intentions there.”
That line had not started for Calgary this season. Westgarth and Jones had combined to play 21 games, averaging a little over 19 minutes combined. Hartley, presumably, then set fire to a pile of papers and expressed surprise that the papers had chosen to combust.
“I thought my players responded tremendously,” Tortorella told reporters. “Listen, it shouldn’t be in the game, that stuff. I don’t want it in the game. But I have to protect my team, too. So all the pundits, all the people pissing and moaning, they don’t have a clue what a locker-room’s about. They don’t understand the whole circumstance involved in that type of situation.”
He’s right, only because this happens in the NHL. He’s done it in the NHL. It happened three times in four months when Tortorella’s New York Rangers were working on a blood feud with Pete DeBoer’s New Jersey Devils two years ago. So there are protocols, penalties, fines, the usual.
Brian Burke is in charge of the Calgary Flames, and he acquired Westgarth this season despite already having McGrattan, and at the very least, you got the feeling that Hartley wasn’t averse to impressing his boss.
Tortorella’s attempt to get into the Flames room after the first period, though — that’s where a suspension and fine is both necessary and expected, because you just can’t do that.
When the dumb stuff breaks out on the ice, it’s contained — the benches don’t clear anymore, and fans no longer get beaten with their own shoes by visiting players. Line brawls are dumb, and may one day come up in class-action litigation, but at least it’s under some veneer of control.
But Tortorella had an entire period to decide how he was going to spend his intermission, and he spent it creating a dangerous situation in a crowded hallway. CBC caught McGrattan holding back Calgary goalie coach Clint Malarchuk — Malarchuk was steaming out of the sea of white jerseys, fury scrawled on his face, and got face-washed by his own player at one point — as Tortorella was held back from getting to Hartley.
This is supposed to be a professional league that has to at least keep the mayhem inside the boards.
Of course, his players probably love him for standing up for them, and though he probably won’t be standing behind them for a little while, they might be cool with that too. Tortorella has a genuine anger issue, but he’s calculated, too.
To that end, Tortorella is successfully overshadowing a team that is suddenly losing a lot of puck possession battles, whose offence comes and goes, that lost one game 9-1 this week and saw Sestito get his boxing hobo nickname in another, that is limping along right on the edge of a brutal playoff picture. Henrik Sedin is hurt — another reason not to put him out there to start the game — and the Canucks have a reputation of being picked on by physical teams. Tortorella is surely trying to change that culture. This is one result.
We can all laugh about it, sure. We can imagine Hartley arriving at his office on Sunday, and Tortorella crouching in the ceiling tiles, waiting for him. We can imagine Hartley starting his car, oblivious to Tortorella, lurking in the trunk. We can imagine Hartley arriving home after a long day, and finding Tortorella hiding in the wardrobe.
But in the NHL’s version of real life, you can understand why he did it, and why he would be angry, and why he needs to be suspended anyway. It’s ridiculous that a team that has four regulation wins since the beginning of November can create a situation that forces a team in a playoff race to put a top defenceman like Kevin Bieksa in harm’s way, just to answer some imaginary bell; it’s the kind of stupid nuclear standoff that a team like Vancouver shouldn’t need. But this is the NHL. Skill is constantly getting dragged into the muck. That’s hockey.
Still, Tortorella should know better. The violence in the NHL is close enough to the surface on the ice; it doesn’t need to be anywhere else.
Leaving aside the question of why anybody would want to enter the Calgary Flames dressing room during this dreadful season unless they were being expressly paid to be there — it’s been a long year — that was where the stupid leaped outside the usual NHL box.