Kinder, gentler NHL taking shape
After-the-whistle trash talking, rage clearly on decline
For more than a dozen years, Joffrey Lupul has been an NHL player. On some nights, he’s still an NHL fan.
Friday night, for instance: Lupul said he was flipping by the Penguins-Kings game when something happened that grabbed his attention. Tempers flared. Sticks flailed. As reporter Bill West wrote later in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “The Kings turned the area around the crease into a war zone.” There were instances of random slashings and jersey-grabbings and near-fisticuffs. And even if there were no actual fights, as per the trend in recent-vintage NHL contests, Lupul was intrigued.
“I kept watching when usually I would have changed the channel,” Lupul said. “It’s fun to see that emotion in the game.”
That kind of emotion — or, more specifically, the lack thereof in many contests — has been a recent topic of hockeyworld discussion. The guys on Leafs Lunch, the TSN radio show, were remarking this past week about the absence of on-ice animosity in a lot of the NHL content they’ve taken in this season. Ray Ferraro, the 1,258-game NHL alumnus who now does TV colour commentary, pointed to the Maple Leafs match in Minnesota earlier this month as a notable snoozer.
“It was the most polite game. It was like the guys were going to say, ‘Excuse me’ if they bumped into each other,” Ferraro said.
Ferraro noted he’d seen plenty of games just like it this season. And as for the reasons being attributed to the downtick in tilts of the more bedlam-inspiring, rage-filled variety — well, those reasons are at the crux of a conversation worth having as the NHL navigates the demise of fighting and the mounting tension and simmering tempers that came with it.
“You don’t see as much after-the-whistle stuff. You don’t hear guys talking as much — the game’s undergone a big change in the past three or four years,” Lupul said. “All that stuff gets ramped back up come playoff time. But you can see in the regular season, it’s not there as much.”
It’s not there as much because skill is valued above all else now; because the league has cracked down on nastiness with the power of HD video replay; because third- and fourth-line bangers have often been replaced by faster, younger stock; because those younger players came up through junior ranks that have clamped down on mayhem; because players from opposing teams are friendlier with each other than they’ve ever been. The list goes on, to be sure.
On Leafs Lunch this past week, both Dave Poulin and Jeff O’Neill, the explayers who’ve done time with the Maple Leafs as assistant general manager and winger, respectively, made note of how pre-game warm-ups have become far more social than they were in earlier eras. O’Neill said that during his years with the Carolina Hurricanes he once made the mistake of speaking to friend Jason Allison, he of the Boston Bruins, during warm-up. A traditionalist named Gary Roberts, O’Neill’s teammate in Carolina, took great offence to the chumminess.
“Roberts hated my guts for 48 hours,” O’Neill told his radio audience.
Such ‘us-against-them’ line-drawing seems to escape many of today’s pros. Speaking after Saturday’s practice Mike Babcock, the Maple Leafs coach, cited the strength of the players’ union as a factor in camaraderie that transcends the crest.
“Obviously there isn’t the violence there was,” Babcock said. “The NHLPA’s a big part of that obviously, and all the meetings and getting to know each other and all those things.”
In a league in which players are united in their hatred of, say, the escrow tax, there seems to be a lot less hating of one another. There’s certainly more training alongside one another — this at various offseason camps at which players of assorted teams often bond. Leafs veteran Brad Boyes said he’s become friendly with a handful of NHLers of various affiliations who base their summertime workouts out of a Mississauga gym, among them Colorado’s John Mitchell.
“We train together. We’ll go grab a beer together after a game. So . . . I’m not going to go and run him and elbow him in the head,” Boyes said of Mitchell. “Not that you’re not going to compete hard against him. But why spear the guy?”
Given the rise in concern about the permanent nature of head injuries, there is also, in some eyes, a growing mutual awareness of the ultimate fragility of the human condition.
“Back in the day it used to be pretty malicious,” said Nazem Kadri, the only Leafs player who’s been penalized for fighting this season. “I think guys now respect the game and respect each other’s bodies and hope nobody gets seriously injured. I mean, anytime you see someone go down, it’s a frightening feeling because you know it could be you.”
There are a zillion other reasons for the change in tone on the cold side of the boards. Lupul cited the increase in the number of smaller, fleeter defencemen who are more likely to play a Nick Lidstrom-type stick-on-puck game than a Chris Pronger-patterned stick-in-flesh style. Across the locker room, Boyes said that given the narrow margins in the standings and the humiliation that comes with a next-morning viewing of a poor on-ice decision in the video room, the NHL idea of retribution — which, back to the game’s earliest beginnings, usually included the mandatory drawing of blood — has been reconsidered.
“There’s that saying, ‘Make ’em pay on the scoresheet.’ And that’s what guys go by now,” said Boyes.
Babcock, for his part, insisted the decline in what the coach called “craziness” hasn’t negatively affected the product.
“If you think they don’t compete, or that the games aren’t tighter than they ever were, or that it isn’t going faster and the hits aren’t harder, (you’d be wrong),” the coach said. “There are not as many stoppages for scraps and there’s not the craziness with your stick and stuff like that. But everything else — anybody who thinks it isn’t hard out there, they’re missing the boat.”
It may be hard. But is it compelling? More than a few recent games suggest hockey fans are due to be served a steady menu of emotions-optional, excuse-me-please evenings in the months to come — or at least until the playoffs arrive in April.
On Saturday, Lupul stood in the Leafs dressing room and considered the abating bile in the sport he plays as a pro and, depending on the circumstance, watches as a fan.
“Sometimes you miss it. Sometimes you don’t,” Lupul said. “That stuff’s fun once in a while. Hopefully that ramps up as the season goes on.”
“I think guys now respect the game and respect each other’s bodies and hope nobody gets seriously injured.” LEAFS’ NAZEM KADRI