I doubt there’s been a more talked about moment in the National Hockey League season than the shocking display of violence and stupidity that rounded out Canada’s passionately celebrated Hockey Day in Vancouver on Saturday night.
And that includes the headlines about the crowd of more than 105,000 who packed into Michigan Stadium on New Year’s Day to watch the 2014 Winter Classic.
For those who might’ve been living under a hockey rock for the past few days, Calgary’s trip west to visit Vancouver on Saturday night resulted in 152 penalty minutes inside the first 0:02 of the contest.
Flames coach Bob Hartley apparently lost his mind and decided to start his fourth line, including noted agitator, Brian McGrattan. A coach only does this for one reason – he wants to stir up trouble right from the outset and boy, didn’t he get his wish.
Canucks coach John Tortorella followed suit, putting out a group of grind/enforcer-type players led by noted goon Tom Sestito, who has been in the headlines quite a bit recently.
He knew what he was being forced to invite, just as Hartley knew damn well what he was trying to instigate.
The result was a mindless line brawl off the face-off. Every player on the ice, goalies excluded, paired off with an opposition player and went at it, the referees helpless, the crowd stunned.
It was quite a debut for Vancouver’s Kellan Lain. He found himself staring his first career NHL game and then, seconds later, had a towering man named Kevin Westgarth in a red Calgary jersey trying to rearrange his face.
I’ve long been an advocate of keeping fighting as a part of the NHL. It provides a deterrent to most players, the most obvious being that a cheap shot on a star player will likely earn you a chance to be pummeled by a towering enforcer with arms as long as telegraph poles the very next shift their coach can get his guy onto the ice with you.
I like that aspect, the on-ice policing of unsportsmanlike play. It’s why there’s rarely headlines about cheap shots and otherwise dirty play.
Fighting can also be used as a way to change the momentum of a game. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen a home team looking sluggish on the ice in front of a packed but subdued arena before one of their players drops the gloves and goes at it.
Not only does it energise the players, it often does the same to the crowd, and suddenly you’ve got a whole new game. I like to see that, too.
What I don’t like to see is what happened on Saturday night in Vancouver.
Sure, the Canucks and the Flames might be rivals, but there’s a difference between two guys on the ice reacting after a series of niggling plays to the contrived and ridiculous brawl off the face-off.
That did nothing to advance either the pro-fighting argument nor the image of hockey.
In Australia, you rarely see NHL highlights unless it’s a brawl. No wonder so many people snidely remark that shooting the puck is only an afterthought; something to do to space out the fights.
For mine, blame must be heaped fairly and squarely on the shoulders of Calgary coach Bob Hartley.
There was absolutely no (sane) reason that he could give as to why he felt the need to start his fourth liners, especially not when he knew what sort of a reaction that move would elicit from his counterpart, Tortorella.
It set entirely the wrong tone for the game, and you have to imagine that Hartley intended for his players to go out there and swing their fists from the outset. It was a brain explosion of the highest order.
People have criticised Tortorella for not defusing the situation by starting a different sort of line, but at what cost? Icing a line featuring his star players, the Sedin twins, would have been a massive tactical blunder.
When you see the opposition coach’s line-up – the road team is required to submit their line-up ahead of the home team – is all fourth-line goons, it doesn’t take a genius to know what’s going to happen next.
So what is Tortorella to do? Watch the Sedin boys get plastered against the glass by a player like McGrattan and risk much, if not all of Vancouver’s season? No, way. That would be another brain explosion.
Tortorella did the only thing he could do. He matched fire with fire to fight fire with fire, and the Canucks fourth-liners gave a good account of themselves. If they didn’t win their bouts, they certainly weren’t disgraced.
Tortorella, of course, was furious. In the aftermath of the fights, he climbed down to the edge of the bench, leaned across the small section between the benches, through and past cameramen and the on-ice report for CBC, and it didn’t take a lip-reader to understand what he was saying to the Flames bench.
Notoriously fiery at the best of times, Tortorella was about as irate as I’ve ever seen him. It continued in the first period, when the Canucks coach, apparently not happy with what he heard back from the Calgary coaches on the bench, tried to force his way into the Flames dressing room at the conclusion of the first period.
The appearance of McGrattan, Westgarth and some others doubtless convinced Tortorella that, on this occasion, discretion was the better part of valour.
Not the smartest move ever, and Tortorella probably regrets that now, but it’s not unusual in the heat of the moment.
The guy wanted some answers, though he didn’t go about getting them in the right way. If I was in his position, so would I.
One might reasonably argue, though, that nothing Hartley and his team of assistants could say would adequately explain their moment(s) of madness.
Consequently, Tortorella has been suspended for 15 days/six games without pay.
He probably deserved that, and he probably understands it, too. But what gets me is that Hartley, the guy who started this entire mess, gets off with a comparative slap on the wrist. His fine, $25,000, is barely anything worth mentioning.
Interestingly – or absurdly – the Calgary President of Hockey Operations, Brian Burke, a guy who I had more respect for yesterday than today, released a statement saying that he is “perplexed” by the fine.
Really? It was Hartley’s actions that led directly to this blight on the game – a blight that hockey fans are still talking about three days after it happened.
I won’t argue that Tortorella didn’t deserve some sort of suspension, though I think 15 days is a little much.
Yes, storming towards the other camp’s locker room wasn’t smart, but Hartley at least deserves something similar. After all, without his icing of the fourth line to start the game, there likely aren’t the scenes like we saw late on Saturday night.
You know what? I’m perplexed, too.
Perplexed that the NHL has made their adjudication in this fashion, without benching Hartley for at least a few games. Call that sort of punishment a deterrent, call it well-deserved, call it both of the above, call it whatever you want.
Let’s get real for a second – 25 large isn’t going to trouble Hartley all that much. He’s making a small fortune to coach in Calgary.
What the league is basically saying is that you can set the stage for a monumental brawl, one that’s given the entire sport a black eye, and $25k is all you get levied by way of punishment. Hardly a deterrent there.
As bad as things were on the ice on Saturday night, the NHL front office’s strange handling of the situation – just when some public relations savvy might’ve come in handy – has made it all seem a whole lot worse.
Watch the incident, here.
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