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Endangering a player is worse than letting them fight

December 30, 2016, 5:33 PM ET [57 Comments]
Ty Anderson
Boston Bruins Blogger •Bruins Feature Columnist • RSSArchiveCONTACT
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This article originally appeared on WEEI.com's Big Bad Blog...

I've never seen a bank robbery live in person. If I were to see one though, I imagine that it'd look a little bit like what I watched the officiating crew do to Thursday's head-to-head between the Bruins and Sabres in what might honestly be the biggest heist of an NHL paycheck since the days of Colin Campbell's paydays as chief disciplinarian.

In the third of four 2016-17 meetings between these fierce division rivals of over four decades, the officiating crew led by referees Ghislain Hebert and TJ Luxmore and linesmen Greg Devorski and Mark Shewchyk did everything they could to absolutely neuter this contest and unnecessarily put a player in harm's way in the process.

Get the obvious out of the way and call it like you see it: these two teams hate each other; The Sabres entered play a desperate mess and in need of a win to make things interesting their pursuit of third place in the Atlantic. The Bruins, with wins in just three of their last 11 games, were equally desperate. Factor desperation with hate and familiarity, and this kind of head-to-head was guaranteed to look closer to the old days of the Adams Division.

And the animosity between these foes resumed from where it last left off as the Sabres' William Carried cheapshotted B's forward David Backes with an illegal check to the head long after Backes had ditched the puck.

Backes, who has concussion history to his name, was eventually helped off the ice by the B's training staff and did not return to action with what's been called an upper-body injury, and the Black and Gold wanted to even the score if given the chance.

That chance came on an offside whistle that prompted Adam McQuaid, who was denied a fight in the B's last game, to go after Carrier. The referees did not want to see McQuaid drop the gloves (which seems to be a theme any time the 6-foot-5 defender is involved in some nastiness), so they decided to get involved. What they did to get involved, however, was a terrible decision.

With McQuaid and Carrier throwing punches, both officials were so focused on keeping McQuaid tethered that they pinned both of his arms down and back, and allowed Carrier to just deliver blow after blow to McQuaid's face much to the delight of the Buffalo crowd. McQuaid, bloodied after perhaps the seventh or eighth defenseless fist to the noggin, was irate.



(Does No. 92 in stripes look familiar? He should. He's one of the bozos that kept McQuaid from fighting Josh Anderson on Tuesday night at Nationwide Arena.)

You can clearly see McQuaid express his frustration with the situation, as he was incapable of defending himself thanks to an assist from the referees. Fighting is dangerous, we all agree. Carrier may have broken the oft-forgotten code of fighting, too, with some punches with referees in the way. But you know what's even more dangerous than both those things? When the fighter is unable to protect himself because the referees do not want him to fight when a fight is very much already happening. And when the player is endangered because of the referees? Woof, talk about the complete opposite of doing your job.

Again, as we said after Tuesday's game, fighting is still a part of this game, and there's no reason why guys like McQuaid should not be allowed to fight (Evander Kane, whose brutal TKO of Matt Cooke has racked up nearly one million views on YouTube, was allowed to fight the Red Wings' Brendan Smith just two nights ago and that video of the Cooke knockout would tell you that he's just as dangerous as McQuaid). So to put an apparent ban (I don't know what else to call something so obvious) on No. 54 tussling is stupid to begin with, but when you're actually pinning his arms down in the middle of a fight, you become ridiculous.

What followed was a hypersensitive crew that just didn't know what to let slide. That showed itself when Brian Gionta chased Colin Miller almost the full length of the rink to respond to a hit he didn't like almost 30 seconds prior after the whistle, and when Miller was assessed a matching roughing for defending himself as he shoved Gionta back. They were just two of the eight penalties that followed in the 31-minute span of hockey after the initial Carrier-McQuaid incident.

In an effort to 'control' the game, the referees lost control and became a flatout joke.

Something that would not have happened had they just let the self-policing way of the NHL work itself out with a scrap that both McQuaid and Carrier had undoubtedly agreed to with the mutual decision to ditch their gloves.

Ty Anderson is the Boston Bruins beat writer for WEEI.com, and has been covering the National Hockey League for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010. He can be heard on the Saturday Skate program on 93.7 WEEI (Boston), can also be found in the New England Hockey Journal magazine, and has been part of the Boston Chapter of the PHWA since 2013. Contact him on Twitter or send him an email at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com.
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