NHL’s crackdown welcome

Fixing faceoff, slashing issues long overdue

Let me start with an unpopular opinion: I totally understand and support the NHL’s pre-season crackdown on faceoff infractions.

Yes, it’s true there’ve been hiccups in the league’s attempt to break from tradition and actually enforce its rulebook. Fans have booed. Players have expressed disgust. And the whole fiasco of watching draw-taking lawbreakers skate a trail to the penalty box has taken, on most nights, a ridiculously long time.

As Leafs centreman Nazem Kadri was saying on Thursday, speaking of the Tuesday pre-season game in which the Leafs were tagged with three minor penalties for faceoff transgressions and were booted from too many draws to count, “I felt like I played a 31⁄ 2- hour game.” (The game actually took 2 hours, 33 minutes to complete, way too long considering no overtime).

And yes, there’s always a chance the whole schmozzle could get worse. A season after hockey lovers were driven to tears by the NHL’s sudden obsession with frame-by-frame video analysis of suspected offsides, one can only hope the boardroom power brokers don’t eventually push for the ultimate torture — video review of faceoff infractions. That’d be a new kind of purgatory.

All that said, everybody who’s upset about this ought to breathe a bit. Let’s not forget we’re in the opening few days of the pre-season. Nobody’s soiling sacred ground here. And even if the league’s execution has probably been lacking — veteran centreman Dominic Moore said he didn’t know anything about the new push by officials until the moments before Tuesday’s game — the essence of the undertaking is hard to criticize.

As Stephen Walkom, the NHL’s director of officials, was saying in an interview on Thursday, the new emphasis is meant to ensure the faceoff is ultimately a competition of stick-on-puck skill rather than a body-on-body free-for-all. For most of the past decade, Walkom said, the faceoff had devolved into a “rugby scrum.” And Walkom said the com- plaints from players were too loud to ignore.

“It was becoming so the linesmen couldn’t even drop the puck anymore, because the players were right on top of them. Too often the linesmen were getting slew-footed off the draw,” Walkom said.

“We weren’t enforcing the existing rules.”

For that sin against the rulebook, Walkom pleaded guilty.

“I’ll take the blame for it — a lot of it was on my watch. We had so much else going on, slowly, over time, the parameters of where the player is supposed to be set up, they eroded,” he said.

It’s good to hear someone who works for the NHL acknowledging he’s not an all-knowing, ever-prescient genius. It’s tough to improve a league, after all, that sees itself as perfect in every way. And Walkom doesn’t pretend the NHL is anything of the sort.

So as much as the faceoff rollout has been, in Walkom’s words, “a bit painful” to watch — “I understand the fan’s perspective, ‘What are these guys doing to the game now?’ ” — it’s important to remember that faceoffs aren’t the only important point of pre-season emphasis. The league is also supporting a zero-tolerance crackdown on slashing that is long overdue and beyond welcome. The philosophy around enforcing slashing is the same as it is around cleaning up faceoffs. Skill, the thinking goes, ought to be rewarded.

Ergo, those who try to suppress skill shouldn’t chronically be given the benefit of the doubt.

Walkom said that after so many years of penalizing hooking to the point of making it less common than it was during the hook-andhold era that preceded the 2004-05 lockout, the past decade-plus had seen players perfect another style of stick-based obstruction.

“They learned the art of the quick whack on the hand,” Walkom said. “The whack happens so fast. And as a referee you’re like, ‘Whoa. Did he get him on the hand? Did he get him on the stick?’ ”

For years, Walkom said, the benefit of the doubt went to the defender and the referee’s default was a nocall.

“Now we’re giving the benefit of doubt to the player with the puck. So we’re hoping the (defenders) will adapt, and stop (slashing),” Walkom said.

That’s a huge shift in thinking that could bring a considerable boost to offence — so long as the NHL persists in backing it. Last season the teams that co-led the league in slashing minors — St. Louis and Pittsburgh — were whistled for 37 such penalties apiece all season. That’s less than half a penalty a game, a remarkably low number considering slashing was epidemic in many eyes. In a sampling of nine pre-season games on Wednesday night for which statistics were available on NHL.com, players were whistled for 42 slashing penalties. That’s more than four a game. In those same nine games, there were a combined eight minor penalties for faceoff violations. So as much as faceoffs are getting the headlines, slashing is getting the bulk of the referees’ attention.

“We probably overcall slashing right now, because we don’t want to risk under-calling it,” Walkom said.

At Leafs training camp on Thursday, Toronto coach Mike Babcock called the new spotlight on slashing “outstanding” and “very important.”

“We’ve got good players. I don’t want ’em getting whacked,” Babcock said.

But this isn’t about what’s good for Toronto. It’s about what’s best for the game. The NHL’s Neanderthal tendencies have been allowing the muckers to drag down the thoroughbreds for too long. Never mind the new influx of speed and skill, last season saw league-wide power-play opportunities dip to their lowest level in the post-1967 expansion era.

So it’s good to hear the man who oversees officiating suggesting that skill players should no longer have to fight through a forest of unchecked stickwork without drawing a whistle — that referees are being reminded to actually call what’s in the rules. Nobody’s saying it means anything just yet, but it’s a solid start.

“People come to the rink to see skilled plays, and see these great hockey players,” Walkom said. “Anything we can do to make that possible — I think it’s good for the game.”

Again, it’s the pre-season. So we’ll see how things go when the games are for real. On Thursday, Kadri expressed a feeling that a lot of longtime observers no doubt share: That there’ll be a gradual relaxing of the standards as the season progresses or, perhaps, regresses.

“It’s tough to stay consistent with that throughout the whole year. It’s really challenging on the officials and the linesmen,” Kadri said. “I’m assuming maybe there’ll be some more leeway throughout the last part of the season.”

Walkom is hoping for something better, clearly. And he’s hoping these pre-season growing pains will save his department from turning the opening throes of the regular season into an unreasonable path to the penalty box.

“Hopefully we won’t have to call five slashing penalties a game (in the regular season), but we will if we have to, to deter the behaviour,” Walkom said.

That’s exactly what the referees should do. Never mind bowing to the perpetual outrage of fans and players. Just call the rulebook and apologize for nothing — except, maybe, that you didn’t start calling it sooner. And allow the stars to be stars.

“(After a while) if you see a whack on the hand, the fans are going to expect a penalty,” Walkom said. “The officials are going to be expected to make the call. The players are going to expect the call will be made. That’ll lead to less (slashing). I think that’ll be a good thing.

“And then we have to be on alert for the next tactic.”