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Curbing Hockey Violence Easier Said Than Done
Dave Bolland brings the Stanley Cup to Mimico. Photo by Christopher Drost/Torontoist.
Late last summer, Chicago Blackhawks’ centre Dave Bolland treated Toronto to a Stanley Cup parade—of sorts.
In a celebration that probably did not look quite like the one that exists in the dreams and imaginations of this city’s hockey fans (where Dion Phaneuf and the rest of the triumphant Maple Leafs wave to hundreds of thousands of elated Torontonians from the backseats of convertibles driving slowly down a closed-off Yonge Street), Bolland sat atop an antique fire truck as it traveled a brief parade route through Mimico, the neighbourhood where, not so long ago, he grew up and learned to play the game. At the parade’s terminus, Bolland held the famous trophy high above his head—every member of every championship NHL team gets to be steward of the Cup for exactly one day during the ensuing off-season—and signed autographs for members of the assembled crowd.
A good young player, but by no means a star, Bolland does not often make headlines. Indeed, his bringing the Stanley Cup home might have been the most newsworthy moment of his career.
But Bolland now finds himself, entirely against his will, near the centre of the most recent chapter in the agonizingly irresolvable debate regarding headshots in hockey.
Usually delivered with a legal shoulder or an illegal elbow, a headshot is any on-ice blow to the head. That does not, however, mean that each one is created equal. Some are the result of clean bodychecks, and others, like the elbow Bolland took from the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Pavel Kubina last Wednesday night, are maliciously intended to injure. Kubina’s elbow, and consequent three-game suspension, are part of the latest manifestation of a sequence with which NHL fans have become familiar: one player injures another with a questionable or outright illegal hit, the league disciplines the offending player or doesn’t, debate rages about the league’s decision and hockey violence in general, and then everything eventually subsides.
The twist in this case is that Kubina was suspended just one day after it was announced that Boston Bruins’ captain Zdeno Chara would not be disciplined, for sending Montreal Canadien Max Pacioretty headfirst into a rinkside stanchion, giving Pacioretty a concussion and breaking a vertebra in his neck.
Canadiens fans are understandably incensed that Chara will suffer no repercussions for causing an injury that may well end Pacioretty’s career. Some of them are even trying to involve the Montreal police.
Meanwhile, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman is in Florida this week for the league’s annual general managers’ meetings, where discussing head injuries in hockey is expected to be a priority. Unsurprising, considering the recent revelation that ex-NHL enforcer Bob Probert (now deceased) had developed a degenerative brain disease, perhaps as a result of head injuries sustained during his career, and that the league’s best player, Sidney Crosby, has spent the better part of this season out of uniform battling post-concussion symptoms.
Just please don’t expect this week’s meetings to produce any sort of profound reforms.
What has been plainly obvious for a very long time is that the NHL is not interested in seriously addressing this issue, and that isn’t likely to change now, regardless of the number of hollow threats and meaningless condemnations hurled at the league by self-interested corporate sponsors. Bettman’s tenure as commissioner has been characterized by an obsessive determination to expand into new markets and to tinker with the rules in the hopes of making the game more popular, particularly among Americans. He simply won’t wage war on hockey violence, because such a war threatens to make the game less popular.
And who can blame him?
After all, hockey fans, overwhelmingly, want to see physical play. Arenas roar for a fight or even a solid bodycheck as vociferously as for a goal. Many are the men who’ve made long, successful careers out of their roles as limited-skill thugs, skating back and forth between the end of the bench and the penalty box. Any effective strategy for reducing the incidence of hits to the head would, necessarily, involve making skaters contemplating a bodycheck more cautious. It would, by definition, move the NHL game in the direction of less hitting, a direction which Bettman rightly believes would be unpopular.
Some, incredibly, still believe that hits to the head can be effectively policed by the players themselves.
The unofficial method for resolving on-ice disputes between players, long and fiercely defended by hockey traditionalists like doddering imbecile Don Cherry, allows rival teams to settle old scores by pitting their respective goons against each other in a mid-game fist fight.
This system, besides being ridiculous, clearly does not work. At least, Pacioretty would probably tell you that NHLers are no safer for its existence.
But those same hockey traditionalists hit the nail on the head when they say that this system, and the occasional head injuries that come with it, is part of the game and always has been. And there are other things that have gone unchanged over the years. The elements that made NHL-brand hockey appealing to its fans once upon a time—the speed and the finesse, but also the hitting and the fighting—are still the elements attracting new fans today.
The expansion of the league, from the Original Six teams to thirty franchises in places as unlikely as Nashville and Tampa Bay, suggests some things about the majority of those of us who call ourselves fans of the NHL.
It suggests we acknowledge that hockey players need to skate with their heads up to avoid the big hit. It suggests we accept that on-ice vengeance will be taken for elbows and cheap shots. It suggests we know that sometimes players will get hurt, but that most of them will be okay. It suggests we have, for generations, said that this is good enough.
A great many of us now say we are worried about the NHL’s repeated refusal to make a meaningful effort to curb the prevailing culture of headshots in hockey.
But are we worried about what that refusal implies about us as fans of the game and as people? Even just a little bit?