By Joel Smart (The Cascade) – Email
Date Posted: October 11, 2011
Print Edition: October 5, 2011
If the preseason was any indication, this 2011-2012 NHL season is going to feature some of the strictest suspensions ever seen in the NHL, as the League makes a concerted effort to eliminate some of the most dangerous types of hits from the game. It’s a worthy goal, but as the risk of punishment increases, so too does the risk of players opting to skip physical play altogether. One way or another, NHL hockey is changing; newly-appointed NHL senior vice president of player safety Brendan Shanahan has made it clear that head hits and repeat offenses will no longer be tolerated in the game.
“Right now, it’s a feeling-out process for the players and the referees and Shanahan,” Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault told The Province. “Every time there’s a hit, there are parts of the body that are going to go one way or the other. Is every hit right now a penalty? I think everybody is trying to sort that out.”
Dissenting opinions on the strength of the suspensions is not hard to find among fans and critics of the game, but so far few within the game have chosen to speak out against the new direction the League is headed in. However, Clarke MacArthur, a forward for the Toronto Maple Leafs, recently expressed serious concern with the way things are going. “I just think there is going to be no hitting in this game. I think that’s what’s going to happen. No one wants to take five-, 10-game suspensions,” MacArthur said in comments that aired during Hockey Night in Canada after the Canucks final pre-season game. He made the comments after being suspended for the first two games of the regular season for a hit that Shanahan deemed a head shot. “You really have to think when you’re finishing your hit. You really have to pay attention, because the guy with the puck doesn’t have any responsibility anymore. It’s on the guy hitting.”
To a degree, his comments can’t be argued with. Physical players have never had so many conflicting pressures put on them before. They are encouraged to make big hits, but a player can only have so much control over what happens when that contact is made. In both head hits in the Canucks final preseason game against Edmonton, the head contact seemed to be an unintentional consequence of attempts by Alex Edler and Marco Sturm to make clean hits. “I wasn’t trying to do anything like that…if I got a piece of his head, that’s not what I tried to do,” Edler clarified in his post-game interview. The only way for these players to truly protect themselves from the chance of suspension is to skip making those hits at all. “There is a lot of speed and decisions are made in a fraction of a second,” said Vigneault, “and I’m not quite sure how this is going to turn out.”
As the season progresses, if Shanahan continues to suspend players at the rate he has, it seems increasingly likely that players will adjust by simply reducing the number of hits they attempt. Meanwhile, players who simply won’t remain in the NHL if they don’t fill their required “quota” of hits will bear the brunt of the changing policy.
Big hits are an incredibly entertaining aspect of the game, but they also play an important role in keeping the game fast and intense. They increase the rate of turnovers, and improve the flow of the game. Yet, with our increasing understanding of the damage that can occur from hits to the head, it is time to face the facts.
Those of us that love the game also love the players who play it, and so their health and well-being needs to be considered. Brendan Shanahan is a well-respected former NHL player, and though his decisions could potentially remove an aspect of the game that we have come to love, who better to try his hand at improving the situation than he? Much will be learned this coming season, and fans of the game can only hope that a fair balance can be found.
