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The Ontario Hockey League's taken the first step to proactively curbing the amount of fighting, and the National Hockey League's paying close attention.
Rule changes installed effective immediately will severely punish those who pass installed fight-total thresholds over the sixty-eight game regular season -- a move that certainly prioritizes player development and the protection and health of player assets, moving away from the enforcers and goons that are being frequently processed out from the National Hockey League ranks.
Below, the implemented changes:
1. If a player is assessed a fighting major for the 11th to 15th time during the regular season, such player is assessed an automatic two game suspension for each additional fighting major in addition to any other penalties assessed.
2. If a player is assessed a fighting major for the 16th time or more during the regular season, such player is assessed an automatic two game suspension and the hockey club is fined $1,000.00 for each additional fighting major in addition to any other penalties assessed.
3. If a player is deemed to be the instigator in any of the fights above the 10 game threshold, such player would be assessed an automatic four game suspension in addition to any other penalties assessed.
The pro-enforcer crowd was immediately up in arms, but I suspect they're missing the overarching point here. The sharply-toned rhetoric about killing off fighting in hockey is as laughable as it is farcical. No, this is a clear and decisive swing against the players who rank dead-last in the talent pool, only skating infrequent minutes to temporarily halt the game for a boxing match. It's not a war against fighting -- it's a war against goons.
Believe it or not, all of this is qualified. The NHL and OHL carefully collaborated on these thresholds, so the number of 10+ in the 68GP regular season would take some serious work to reach for a player with legitimate skill. Consider the twenty-five(
note: this number may even be less; fights instigated against, as mentioned above, do not count towards the total) OHL players who would've been dinged by the rule changes last season:
In total, there are four players who managed to pass the paltry twenty-point marker, including Mitchell Heard, Anthony Camara, Cody Sol, and Adam Payerl. Heard and Sol were just one fight above the installed limit and could easily drop that number; same could probably be said for Camara and his thirteen. Payerl may have to modify his game a touch.
The majority of the incredibly small-sample of OHL players affected were in place to do one thing and one thing only -- fight. Most ranked in single-digit point totals and were completely ineffective in the game of hockey.
I mentioned it above, but the enforcer is a dying breed, and
Colin Campbell's role in drawing up the fighting rule changes in the OHL isn't a coincidence. The NHL's need for pure fighters diminishes by the year, and the supply // demand curve has shifted accordingly. Teams are actively seeking talent, opting to skate 12F/6D of talent on a game-to-game basis. The need for fighters who can't play the game is -- well, gone.
An incredibly minute pro-enforcer crowd won't agree, but again, this all manifests in the numbers. Let's look at NHL players who would've received infractions due to fight totals on a pro-rated, eighty-two game scale. Any fighter north of twelve fights would've been subject to supplemental discipline:
You'll immediately notice that even slugs like Krys Barch, George Parros, Eric Boulton, B.J. Crombeen, et al. couldn't make the cut. That's how high the number is. You really, really have to go out of your way to join the selected group of twelve players.
Aside from maybe Brandon Prust, none of these guys offer much to the sport. They're simply sideshows, implemented to inflict as much pain as possible, often at arbitrary points in the game.
Really, it's the beauty of this rule -- one I have vehemently advocated for a couple of years in earlier blog posts. It's hardly a swing at the role of fighting; hell, by installing limits, the OHL and NHL essentially accept the fact that it's a regular part of the game, and that players do need to police themselves in some sort of manner.
The introduction of the rule at the junior ranks is fantastic on multiple levels. Not only can the NHL gauge its effectiveness without tweaking their own product right out of the gate, it takes another giant step in preserving the health of assets as they come through the junior ranks. With more and more information readily available on head trauma and concussions in North American contact sports, the NHL has to remain vigilant in its fight to protect the players. As
Neate Sager at Y! pointed out, it's necessary at this stage of the game:
Granted, yes, fights are not a leading cause of head injuries. But it takes Dean Del Mastro-levels of cognitive dissonance to wonder how a player can be suspended for a check to the head when the other player dropped his head at the last moment, yet there's nothing that limits a player from fighting every other game, where blows to the head are traded. With what we are coming to know about CTE, that cannot stand much longer.
The risks of playing sports professionally will always exist -- concussions will happen, players will risk careers due to violent injury. However, any way to curb the periphery -- the injuries that occur simply to appease a wildly uninformed and bloodthirsty minority -- is welcomed.
Jesse Spector at the Sporting News had a
fantastic column about the above-referenced yesterday. I particularly loved quotes by Christopher Newinski and Dr. Robert Cantu on the matter:
One thing that has been learned, and that perhaps should have been evident before, is that chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease that Cantu studies but can only diagnose posthumously, is not a disease limited to football players. The full title of Nowinski’s book was "Head Games: Football’s Concussion Crisis," but the film, while primarily focusing on football, features a wide variety of sports, including hockey.
“This isn’t just about doom and gloom in the long term,” Nowinski said. “This is about getting information to make the change to their behaviors, while they’re playing, to extend their careers and their lives. Players need to know that—you look at the Sidney Crosby situation, and think about that the first hit to the head he got (in the 2011 Winter Classic) was not taken seriously. The second one, four days later, he took a year off. You really appreciate that the first hit needed a week or two off. That’s the obvious medicine, is not to play with it.”
One more quote, via ex-NHL'er Keith Primeau:
“Part of the dilemma is that kids don’t care to know, or just don’t understand, but oddly enough, it’s not just the kids,” Keith Primeau said. “Sometimes, it’s the parents that don’t want to know. We’ve set up booths before at hockey tournaments, and the kids stop to get the information, but the parents quickly scurry them along so they don’t find out the information. That’s something we need to overcome. It’s not something to fear, but something to be understood. Chayse, I think, he just didn’t know about it and he didn’t have to fear it.”
Primeau's quote is a giant exclamation point, and really confirms what most of us already knew. Many players simply don't prioritize their individual health -- some of this is cultural, some of this is a lack of awareness. Whatever the case may be, this is an iron-wall that needs to be broken through.
I mentioned the talentless Krys Barch above when noting NHL'ers who, ironically enough, didn't meet what would-be an incredibly high fight-total threshold if the rule were to be installed at the professional level. Barch immediately came to Twitter to vehemently oppose the rule change, not that anyone should be surprised. Barch's only role in the NHL is to fight and fight often, so it's not as if he's a neutral or objective observer in the matter:
Krys Barch @krysbarch
We may be witnessing the loss of tough, physical, skilled power forwards and defensemen alike in our game. Thank god for the #WHL .....
..... as they still hopefully can develop players like #MilanLucic and #ZdenoChara to name a few. Both were heavy weights in junior ......
I wonder if those types of players will now go by the wayside. Just hope we aren't changing a man's game into a boy's game!
This is the common refrain we heard from the FIGHT! crowd, although Barch -- like most everyone who opposes this rule -- misses the point of the rule in the first place. Barch plays to various appeals to the unknown, then makes some ridiculous, unfounded observation that the marginalization of enforcers will lead to, for back of better descriptors, soft players.
His evidence is pretty amusing, though. You'll notice that his defense also comes paired with a pro-WHL argument, citing developmental talent like Zdeno Chara. I found this readily amusing, as Chara -- in his lone WHL season -- had ten total fights, meaning he would not have been subjected to any form of supplemental discipline.
Lucic is another fantastic example. While Lucic did engage in quite an impressive total of fights during his WHL days, the reason why he's stuck at the NHL level has little -- if anything -- to do with fighting ability. No, he's actually become a fantastic hockey player, and in stunning(!) correlation, his fight totals have ranked in the single-digits for three straight years.
And, not to kick a guy when he's down(and wrong), but a
former colleague on Twitter was quick to point out that the existence of tough-guys at the WHL level really doesn't amount to much of anything when it comes to advancing in professional ranks, with the top-twenty fighters from the 2008-2009 season alone logging a total of one(!) professional game at the NHL level.
Look, I don't hate Barch for voicing an opinion, but it comes off pretty disingenuous when your vested interest in the matter is sitting in another atmosphere.
A reader e-mailed me an interesting take on all of the above, reducing it to one consumable point: Sort all of the positives, sort all of the negatives, and what are you left with?
It's pretty simple. Player development's now a priority, without the ridiculous 1% of sideshows skating around looking to decapitate other players. Protecting health in the short and long-run is filed here, too. Further, the on-ice product is strengthened, without the ridiculous staged-fighting that takes place in the middle of hockey games.
Although not specifically a positive, it certainly would be considered a non-negative: Fighting is still a part of the sport. The OHL and NHL have made that quite clear.
As for the negatives?
Crickets.
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