The NHL world woke up Sunday morning feeling hung-over from a weekend bender gone horribly wrong. There is a certain amount of shame and regret attached when the night slips away from you and Sunday morning felt exactly that way. You will all hear the justification of, “This isn’t who we are! It won’t happen again!” Sadly, this is something we have all heard before. The intervention needs to happen now because the stakes have never been higher.
I am not a knee-jerk reactionary and I pride myself on that. I exercise a great deal of patience before making judgment until all the facts come out. However, the facts are out there, and what the world witnessed on Saturday night was indefensible. A showcase matchup featured on the NHL’s own national network pitted the Boston Bruins against the Pittsburgh Penguins. A rematch of the 2013 Eastern Conference Finals, the two elite clubs had split their first two meetings of the season.
It took approximately 20 seconds before the game took a turn for the ugly. Penguin defenseman Brooks Orpik caught Boston’s Loui Eriksson as he was coming out of the zone with a brutal hit that sent the Bruin forward to the ice and ultimately to the sidelines indefinitely. The hit itself was not whistled and is the type of play that Orpik is known for. Not necessarily a dirty player, Orpik is an aggressive hitter.
He didn’t need to hit Eriksson in the manner that he chose to, particularly since the puck was not in possession and was out of Eriksson’s reach. A slow motion replay shows that Orpik clearly caught Eriksson in the head with his shoulder, the type of hit that the NHL has been trying to get rid of.
There are a couple of factors to consider here. Hockey is a contact sport. Brooks Orpik epitomizes the word contact, making it a key and essential element to his game. Loui Eriksson has a history of head injuries, missing five games earlier this season with a concussion.
Orpik’s captain Sidney Crosby had been the poster boy for head injuries with his well-documented absence from hockey due to multiple headshots. The hit by Orpik was legal in the eyes of the referees, but the subjective part of the game is this: Violence for the sake of violence does not grow the sport of hockey or put the game in a positive light.
It causes potentially career-ending injuries and needs to be enforced by the league with those concerns in mind. Where the National Football League has rules in place to protect “defenseless” players from similar hits, Eriksson was in a prone position and suffered a devastating hit because the NHL currently allows him to.
The carnage continued at 8:57 of the first period as Boston’s Brad Marchand was tripped up in the Boston zone. As he looked up the ice, James Neal skated by and caught Marchand in the head with his left knee as he was skating behind. We’ll never know what Neal was thinking as he skated past the agitating Marchand, but it is certainly difficult to believe that he couldn’t have avoided the prone player laying on the ice. It was a cheap, dirty play by Neal that the NHL is looking at and I would expect a considerable suspension for what I perceived to be a deliberate attempt to injure another player.
Seconds after Neal’s cheap shot, the violence boiled over. Shawn Thornton, Boston’s “enforcer”, who had already tried to engage Orpik in a fight after the Eriksson hit earlier, had seen enough. As the referees blew the play dead, Thornton confronted Orpik again, pulling him down from behind before sucker punching the prone defenseman several times in the face. As Kris Letang pulled the Boston wing off of his fallen teammate it became apparent that Orpik was in trouble. He lay motionless on the ice, unconscious from the attack while medical personnel were being summoned frantically.
It was a grisly and frightening scene that has no place in arenas designed for entertainment. Obviously the Bruins were looking for some type of justice on the ice for their fallen teammates but went way over the line. The worst part in all of this (besides the injuries, obviously) is that there is a warped defense being offered for Thornton’s actions. The player himself knew he was in the wrong expressing regret at his actions. As the player at the wrong end of a consensual beat down at the hands of Buffalo’s John Scott, Thornton knows all to well about being knocked woozy from a punch.
"Obviously I made a mistake," Thornton said. "I'm aware of it. I've been told that they're having a hearing and it's hard for me to say much more other than that's not my intention. I feel awful. I feel sick. It's always my job, I guess, to defend my teammates, but I've prided myself for a long time to stay within the lines," he continued, speaking quietly after the game. "It's hard for me to talk about right now. I can't say I'm sorry enough. I'm sure I'll be criticized, but it's true."
It is easy to believe Thornton who has been more than just a mindless pugilist in his career. He has been a productive player with his stick and his fists for Boston over the years, but he knows that he will be perceived differently after this. It has been ten seasons since Todd Bertuzzi took a similar approach to vigilante justice as a member of the Vancouver Canucks. I’ll spare the details for those who don’t recall, but here is the link.
This is the opportunity for the NHL to stand up and make real changes to the game. We aren’t talking about abolishing fighting or changing the game of hockey. This is about putting out real consequences for players that make bad decisions.
Major suspensions (20 plus games) and six-figure fines will change the culture of the players in the NHL. It has worked in the NFL and will do the same to players in the NHL. There were (at least) three terrible decisions Saturday night by veteran players who know better than to hurt an opponent. Yet there they were in front of a national television audience, the showcase of the two best teams in the east, trading preventable concussions.
What was lost in all of the dialogue and stretchering, concussing and punching was a damn good hockey game. No one will even remember who won the game at this point because the ugliness makes for better conversation around the water cooler, bar stool or kitchen table.
It will be featured on Sportscenter and every mainstream sports channel as the news of the week. At a time that we should be gearing up for the Winter Classic and the 24/7 HBO series that debut next week, Shawn Thornton will be the focus of the NHL world.
The time is now for Gary Bettman, Brendan Shanahan and the NHL to take a stand. Not so much as a reaction to the violence, but to be proactive against the escalation of the violence. Live by the commitment you have made to outlaw the head shots and promote player safety. Then understand that the the NHL will never be more than a sideshow if they continue to allow "benders" like Saturday night.