The NHL wants to crack down on concussions, they say. Their goal, they say, is to change the culture of the game so players respect one another and stop the questionable hits.
The NHL is lying.
Actions speak louder than words. Really, if you ignore everything that's said, and pay more attention to what's done, it becomes painfully obvious what the NHL's number one concern is, and it's got nothing to do with player safety.
It's all about image.
Take, for example, the two suspensions the NHL just handed out, almost simultaneously.
Niklas Hjalmarsson's brutal hit on Jason Pominville received two games. James Wisniewski's apparently
pantomiming the act of enjoying a large, delicious popsicle also received two games. Let's compare the two acts.
On one hand, you have a guy who sent a player to the hospital by brutally checking him from behind into the boards. The hit was not only boarding, but also interference, as Pominville had not yet received the puck, although it was traveling towards him. In other words, he had little reason to even suspect that a check was forthcoming. This is essentially the same kind of hit that
Joel Quennville called "the most dangerous hit in hockey" -- a boarding hit on someone who doesn't have the puck. Pominville was escorted off the ice in a stretcher.
On the other hand, James Wisniewski was on television and he made a gesture that,
if you have a dirty mind, could be read as something obscene. Everybody saw it, unless they didn't watch the game, in which case you saw a really blurry James Wisniewski apparently doing something, or not. It was so horrible that they couldn't show it in replays. When it comes to sexual innuendo, hockey coverage apparently isn't allowed to be as racy as
Tyra Banks on her talk show or
Spongebob Squarepants. As Brendan Morrison observed, you're "under a microscope" as a professional athlete, and held to a higher standard. Sure, you need to represent the game well. I can't pretend I don't know why you shouldn't do what Wisniewski did.
Still, when the two offenses are given equal punishment, they're put on equal footing. According to the NHL, blindsiding a player with a dangerous and illegal hit that sends them to the hospital and can potentially end their career is
exactly as bad as pantomiming something dirty. What message does that send?
The reality is that the NHL suspends players based more on the image of the league than the safety of the players. Hjalmarsson is an important piece on a team that just won the Cup, and those players
tend to get free rides. For example, explain to me the difference between this horrible,
30-game suspension and
this not-nearly-as-bad 8-game suspension. If you couldn't see the difference (besides that Simon stomped on Ruutu's skate, whereas Pronger stomped on Kesler's calf), it was that Chris Pronger was on a team that had just won the Cup, and they were 9 games out of the playoffs. The NHL makes a big deal about marketing defending Cup champions -- if Pronger isn't there, it hurts the marketing and leads to questions that hurt the league's image. Initially, the NHL's reaction was no suspension at all, but after massive outcry by fans of the game, the NHL "
received new footage" of the stomp and decided it was suspension-worthy.
It's not news that the NHL seems to have more difficulty suspending offensive stars than it does fourth-line grinders, so this blog feels like it's beating a tired drum. This evidence shows, though, that the league is less willing to suspend players when it will hurt the NHL's image, and
more than willing to suspend players they feel have damaged their image.
Sean Avery got 6 games for his admittedly obscene comments. Six games means the NHL considered it worse than
this. And
this. And
this. And
this. And even
these.The league doesn't want to suspend these hits, because violence sells. If a hit like Hjalmarsson's was met with a 15-game suspension, players would think twice about those kind of hits. Bettman has said over and over that they don't want to create an environment when players are afraid to make clean checks. He's said over and over that they don't want to take hitting or fighting out of the game. Violence sells. Anger sells. Viciousness sells. So they avoid long suspensions if they can, unless they're dealing with nobodies like Chris Simon, Jesse Boulerice, or (at the time) Steve Downie.
Willie Mitchell argued that
the league has difficulty staying consistent. I disagree. I think they've shown a great deal of consistency, in that there are three kinds of infractions:
the ones they feel they can ignore without getting into too much trouble,
the ones they suspend because they have to for image's sake, and
the ones that actually bother them because they make hockey look bad. You can make hockey look bad with
a brutal hit that's highly publicized, or apparently, just making a rude gesture on television. Either way, it's clear that they care about how an incident (and their response) looks a whole lot more than they care how it threatens player safety.
This is about as short-sighted and foolish as you can get, because the dangerous hits and (seemingly) inconsistent discipline for it will be more damaging to the league's reputation than any apparent reduction of intensity that occurs when players start playing safely. More to the point, they've got a moral obligation to protect their players and they're failing to meet it.
As far as the players are concerned, though, the message is clear -- if you're so angry that you feel like maybe making a gesture implying that another player might enjoy popsicle-related activity, you'd be better off just cross-checking him in the face.
Basically, my points boil down to three things. First, in punishing image problems with the same number of games that they do dirty hits and safety issues, they cheapen the whole disciplinary process by using it to defend the league's image rather than the players. Second, that the contrast in suspension severity makes it just as palatable to a player to crosscheck a guy in the face as it is to make a rude gesture or say something off-color. Third, that the only consistency in NHL discipline has been that they're far more concerned with damage to their reputation than damage to players on the ice.
