By Cam Cole, Vancouver Sun columnist
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/
March 20, 2012
VANCOUVER — Let’s go out on a limb here and speculate that if a line brawl happened by design at the opening faceoff of a National Hockey League game in a Canadian city, the ensuing crapstorm would be more than the league could weather.
But when it occurs by mutual agreement at Madison Square Garden, mere blocks away from the commissioner’s office, not only isn’t it a cause for alarm, it’s a marketing bonanza.
Gangs of New York, lacking only Martin Scorsese directing.
True, the league has tried to get rid of staged fights before —- or at least add 10-minute misconducts to penalties for engaging in them — only to be shot down by the Players’ Association out of fear that an entire class of meatheads would be out of jobs. Publicly, the NHL deplores appointment brawls.
But what will you bet that, whether there be fines or just warnings arising from Monday’s stupidity, there are also high-ranking NHL staffers rubbing their hands together at the headlines generated by two New York-area teams — and best of all, one of them wasn’t the woebegone Islanders — who so clearly hate each other.
“Look at the fans. They love it!” Gary Bettman is surely saying to his top lieutenants, when six knuckle-draggers — three each from the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils — doff the gloves as soon as the puck drops to start the game on Monday night.
“We can’t buy this kind of advertising. And wait ... look at that camera shot. Scraping blood off the ice. Looks like a dozen strawberry snow-cones out there. That’s television magic, is what that is.”
It’s more than that. It’s “Slap Shot 4: The Empire Strikes Back.” In which the battlefield has moved from the Federal League to the NHL, now that the big league’s deep thinkers, after a few years of letting political correctness nearly ruin the game, have reclaimed the moral low ground.
Hooking, holding, interference? They’re all necessary to slow the game down. God knows, no one likes a fast game. Hits from behind? Everyone’s turning his back now, trying to draw a penalty. Little fake artists, most of them.
Boarding? We like to call it “finishing the check.”
And all this concussion talk? Enough, already. The league is in Year 5 of its 10-year feasibility study on dialling back the size and maiming capacity of equipment, but these things take time. We don’t want to rush into softer, smaller pads just because a few brittle-headed kids can’t keep their heads up. Change the pads, and sure, maybe you save some brains, but guys are going to start hurting their elbows and shoulders, and then how are they supposed to fight?
Besides, general managers have bent over backwards trying to stop concussions from ... what’s that? A blanket ban on head hits? What are you, some kind of communist? Let’s just accept concussions as the cost of doing business, and change the subject.
Yeah, penalties are down, power plays are down, scoring is down. But parity is up. You can’t trump parity.
And so, friends, playoff-style, swallow-the-whistle hockey is back. It made its return in the Stanley Cup final last year, and gave the vocal hawks little frissons of rapture, and thus was the NHL encouraged to begin its relaxation of the rules even earlier this season.
It’s true that the rookie senior VP of (cough, cough) player safety Brendan Shanahan proved harder to tame than originally expected, but he’s finally rolled over and figured out who his bosses are, so sanity has returned to supplemental discipline.
All in all, the world is back on its axis, to the point where fans at MSG and in Newark can buy their popcorn and enjoy a good three-ring circus without the lingering smell of elephant dung.
Three times this season alone — three — the Rangers and Devils have begun hockey games with brawls at the opening faceoff. That doesn’t just happen, it happens because coaches leave no doubt what they expect from their goons.
You’ll notice the fights didn’t start before the faceoff, because that would result in a $25,000 fine for each team, and if any player were fingered as an instigator before or after the game or any period, it’s a 10-game suspension. And a coach gets fined $10,000 if one of his players instigates a fight in the final five minutes of a game. So the timing has to be just right.
Can you say “orchestration”?
Monday’s donnybrook was inevitable as soon as Devils coach Pete DeBoer pencilled three fourth-liners into his starting lineup and John Tortorella was forced (by The Code, naturally) to start three hammerheads of his own, including defenceman Stu Bickel, who took the opening faceoff. Perhaps that was a clue.
As an added bonus, TV cameras caught Tortorella yelling at DeBoer across the benches even before the puck drop.
“High marks for those guys,” Tortorella said, of his thugs. “I’m thrilled how they responded. I see the juice in our team after that. Whether I agree with it or disagree with it, I like the way our team handled it.”
"I guess in John's world you can come into our building and start your tough guys, but we can't do the same in here. He's either got short-term memory loss or he's a hypocrite. So it's one or the other," the Devils coach said.
It’s the other, Pete. But he’s got plenty of company.
ccole@vancouversun.com
On Twitter: Twitter.com/rcamcole
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