Slipping back to the ice age
When discussing the scattershot enforcement of on-ice behaviour in the NHL, it’s important to remember a key fundamental: This is a league that treats its rulebook like a D-minus student treats a schoolbook.
Reading the thing, let alone paying more than occasional attention to its subject matter, appears to optional. This season, for instance, power-play opportunities were at an all-time low of 2.99 a game per team. Which is not to say there weren’t penalties to be called. Slashing on the hands, for instance, is an offence-disrupting epidemic that’s mostly ignored. But it’s clearly a small part of the reason why scoring continues to stagnate even as the league hails the arrival of a new generation of uber-skilled speedsters.
Back in 2005-06, in the wake of the Shanahan summit that re-imagined a game without clutching and grabbing, teams averaged 5.85 power-play chances a game. Since then there’s been a slow move toward putting away the whistles. Those who grouse about too many calls determining outcomes never seem to acknowledge that results are also skewed by too few. In an era that’s seen bigger sporting powerhouses like the NFL and NBA carefully engineer ways for offence to prosper, the NHL seems perpetually happy to make it as difficult as possible for its best players to fend off the slugs to show their stuff.
Which brings us to the latest instance of Sidney Crosby peeling himself from an ice surface suffering from the effects of another concussion.
Let’s go through the play. It came on Crosby’s third shift of Monday’s Game 3 of Pittsburgh’s best-of-seven series with the Washington Capitals. Crosby had been spectacular in the first two games of the series, reeling off four points in two Pittsburgh wins. So you’d expect the Capitals, a team synonymous with playoff failure, would be focussed on shutting him down.
Still, with Crosby taking the puck to the net a few minutes in, he was on the receiving end of some excessive attention. In the span of a few seconds, Alex Ovechkin slashed Crosby twice, on the shoulder and on the helmet, before Matt Niskanen cross-checked him once, in the face. Niskanen received a major penalty and a game misconduct. Ovechkin wasn’t penalized.
On Tuesday the Penguins announced Crosby has a concussion that would keep him out of Wednesday’s Game 4, at least.
To recap the scorecard: That’d be two head shots to a star player who’s going to miss nearly two full games — and possibly more — to the resultant injury. And what do the Penguins get for their trouble? One power-play opportunity, and Niskanen ejected in a game the Capitals won, 3-2.
As trade-offs go, it wasn’t exactly a saw-off.
You could understand why Pittsburgh’s hockey-loving community was apoplectic, stirred up by wild published theories of premeditated predation by the desperate Capitals. But this wasn’t about a conspiracy. It was a matter of responsibility. Both he and Ovechkin should have been held responsible for the damage caused by their sticks.And yet you would have no trouble finding otherwise reasonable observers leaning on the go-to crutch of hockey’s status-quo pushers — the idea that these bang-bang plays happen so fast that Niskanen had no option but to do what he did.
That’s fragile, even laughable logic. If we’re going to give players credit for their hand-eye genius when they tip in a 100-mph slapshot, we need to acknowledge they are possessed of the ability to make dozens of micro-adjustments in nanoseconds.
And even if Niskanen was simply the victim of wrong-place-at-thewrong-time bad luck — even if Niskanen, as he admitted after the game, meant to cross-check Crosby, just not so hard, and not in the face — well, when it comes to the vagaries of fortune, players who toil in a coin-flip league are accustomed to taking the good with the bad. If you want to see how deftly players can avoid such calamity, all it would take would be a commitment from the league to put more of an onus on would-be Niskanens for the outcomes of contact with opponents in vulnerable positions.
Tuesday’s judgment by playersafety chief Stephane Quintal, that Niskanen wouldn’t be subject to further discipline, tells us we’re a long way from living in that world. Quintal has presided over a gross clawback of suspensions that doesn’t jibe with what’s happening on the ice. He’s too old school for a league in desperate need of someone more progressive. All these years after we’ve learned about the dangers of head injuries, he’s presiding over an operation that still shrugs its shoulders at a cross check to the face — even to the face of the league.
It ought to be a message to the likes of Connor McDavid and Auston Matthews and the rest of the sport’s young stars: Your talent may be pushing the game forward but there are forces forever dragging it back into the garage.
A good-of-the-game commissioner would understand the problem. He’d look at the fireworks created in the NBA since rules that favour offence have been enforced and see possibility. He’d look at the way other leagues have a philosophical mandate to protect their most entertaining assets — the way the NFL shields quarterbacks from the kind of cheap abuse Crosby has dealt with his entire career — and he’d see the future. Crosby’s latest concussion tells us there’s nothing of the sort going on in the NHL.
Then again, why would a league that doesn’t even respect its rules as written bother brainstorming smarter ones for a better game?