Sometimes officials don't understand hockey

Okay, people, it's time to talk about why hockey is getting fucked.

Now's as good a time as any, because no thinking person could believe that I'm trying to paint this loss as the fault of the officials. We lost 8-3 (the night after losing 5-1), we clearly deserved it, and the shitty officiating didn't directly affect the score much anyway. There's stuff to say about the Rangers, but I don't really wanna talk about our shitty hockey team right now. I want to talk about what's happening to the game of hockey at the hands of these ass-hats.

"The GMs are meeting." That's the mantra we keep hearing. Every time there's one of these open-ice hits, one of these blindsiding, away-from-the-puck, looking-the-other-way, obviously-intending-to-injure-a-dude, likely concussing hits, we hear it: the GMs are meeting to discuss what to do. Like some ridiculous cabal of faux NHL royalty (I picture each of them smoking a trademark Sather cigar), the word is that they are going to solve this problem, that more and more of these kinds of hits happen every season, and that nothing seems to deter these kinds of players from doing what they do.

7:39 into the third, 19 seconds after the Pens solidified a win by going up 6-3, Matt Cooke delivered such a questionable, open-ice hit to one Artem Anisimov. Anisimov hobbled off the ice and spent the rest of the night on the bench, with smelling salts. Cooke was awarded a 2-minute interference minor and nothing more. Today, the league decided that this was yet another of this mysterious plague of headshots that they can't possibly understand, and it delivered a 2-game suspension to Cooke. That's it, punishment doled out, problem solved.

Here's the thing: I don't wanna complain about the actual hit. It was obviously dangerous, and there's a pretty strong argument it was intentional. If it was, then part of me agrees with the people who say "make that 2-game suspension a 20-game suspension and it'll stop," because that makes sense. At the end of the day, Cooke doesn't care a whole lot that he got caught and suspended this time: in fact, back in January of this year, he did something similar to Scott Walker, received naught more than a minor interference call at the time, and got a 2-game suspension after the fact. It's easy to see that this kind of officiating (especially with the stigma "you can't suspend someone for the important games" (see: Malkin, automatic 1-game suspension, last playoffs, blah blah blah) is not a deterrent. From the Latin, a deterrent would be "that which deters," and we have just seen that it hasn't. Deterred. Right.

So, yes, if the penalty for this kind of hit somehow became egregiously large, that would certainly do more to, well, deter. But, again, I'm not here to argue that Cooke is a pig or that he deserved a 2-month vacation or anything like that. Even with a phenomenally increased suspension (which I'm not necessarily against), mistakes would still be made. The league would be scared of handing out such a steep sentence, and Cooke would likely have instead received no suspension at all in today's review were this the case. Plus, then Avery could get 30 games for calling Brodeur fat. It's not the cleanest solution. Because let's face it: refs these days are imperfect, by which I mean very shitty at their jobs. These guys blew an icing call, not to mention that Crosby was offsides on his first goal (again, not that it would have made any difference).

So, how is this supposed to work? As the guys in the MSG post-game show uncharacteristically sagely put it, "the players need to police themselves." Cooke needs to know that he will receive many punches for it. Hockey is physical for a reason, and teammates need to stand up for one another and make it clear that running their men all over the ice will not be tolerated. This is where the officials are really, honestly making the game more dangerous.

Cooke's next shift, Brashear also jumped on the ice. He didn't retaliate in a comparable way, but in an appropriate one: he went after Cooke for a fight. Two men, facing off and punching each other. It's undeniably integral to hockey. However, as Sam Rosen (yes, Sam Rosen) said post-game, "it's almost like -- and I know this can't be true -- the linesman doesn't understand how hockey works." As they started to square off, a linesman skated between them (Brashear still got a couple of punches in around the linesman's head before he separated them, but still). He wouldn't let them fight. Brashear got a double minor for roughing, and that was it.

This is how the officials are destroying hockey. In a quest to make it more "approachable" or "PC" or whatever the fuck they're trying to do to market our sport to a bunch of football fans who will never like it, they're trying to remove the notion that it's so violent. Somehow, however, they've misunderstood the actual sport, and they're approaching it like a bunch of people who don't watch hockey. They're penalizing the retaliations more than the infractions. The infractions are subtle intents to injure. The retaliations are noble, obvious man-to-man fights. If they take out the retaliations, more suburban American moms will watch hockey.

What they somehow haven't managed to get through their apparently hockey-deprived brains (or, God forbid, what they understand and don't care about) is that this solution has more people leaving the ice on stretchers. It was undeniably the right thing to do for Brashear to go out there and challenge Cooke - even if you think the hit was legit and legal, you'd agree it was hard and shaking enough that you'd want your man to come out and fight for it. By getting in the way of that fight and sending Brashear off for a double, the officials are showing that they don't understand that, and they're implicitly letting Cooke off the hook for the hit (suspension or otherwise) to return and do it again another time.

On Cooke's following shift, with Brashear in the box, Ryan Callahan, earning his 'A', jumped out to challenge Cooke himself. This was mind-boggling. It was as textbook as a hockey fight gets. They lined up for the faceoff, Callahan tapped Cooke's stick, they looked at each other, tapped sticks, dropped gloves, skated out and circled each other, and came in and started punching (Callahan got his ass kicked, no surprises). When they skated apart, they had each earned the standard 5-minute major for fighting...and a 10-minute misconduct.

For what??? The two parties agreed to fight, there was a physical in-game reason for it, it was an honest, clean fight...it was completely appropriate in every sense. If this fight earned each man a misconduct, I cannot imagine circumstances in which a fight doesn't. The message from the officials, then, is clearly just a generic "do not fight." And that is completely scary.

For a while now, usually in coming to the defense of Sean Avery, I have been circling this issue of what a "dirty" player does and what a "pest" does. It's only natural, therefore, that I invoke Avery again to draw a final comparison here. With 6:14 left in the game, now already at its eventual final score of 8-3, Avery, seemingly unprovoked, went after Ruslan Fedotenko from behind and started punching him. It looked like a hockey fight, only Avery was the only one participating. [Not The Point: It was later revealed that Fedotenko had tried to slew-foot Avery on the previous play, and this is what got Avery so mad. Fair enough. But still.] [Also Not The Point: When this has happened in reverse, with Avery playing the part of Fedotenko, everyone has yelled about how Avery is such a coward, how he'll get in your face but not actually fight you.]

But here's the actual point: what Avery did was absolutely wrong. He got 17 minutes in penalties, and he probably deserved them all. He at least deserved most of them. He jumped after the guy and started pummeling him in a one-sided fight. This is a bullshit move, and I don't support it. Yes, Penguin fans, go ahead, read that again: Avery was in the wrong there.

But what the sports media fails to understand, and what I fear the officials are also missing, is the difference between what Cooke did and what Avery did. Again, please note: I am not saying that Avery was justified, nor that he shouldn't have been penalized. But it was never, for a second, a done to take Fedotenko out of the game. It was done in anger, and it was physical, and it broke the rules in a major way. But Avery was never trying to give Fedotenko a career-ending concussion. The separation people don't seem to be able to make is a separation of respect for the game and its players.

People laugh when I talk about Sean Avery and respect, but the fact is that Avery's just a pest. He's an asshole, yeah, and he yells obscenities about your mother at you, and he distracts you and he sometimes goes off the deep end and tries to fight you. Compare that to open-ice hits that attempt to snap necks and give concussions, or to knee-on-knee hits that take a guy out for half a season, or to checking someone's face into the boards when he's on his way off the ice. It's one thing that the media can't tell the difference, and it labels Avery the "dirtiest" player in a league that contains Jarkko Ruutu, and that NHL live put Cooke's move and Avery's in the same category. But it's another that the officials start to buy into it. If the sportswriters and broadcasters aren't going to know the difference between "annoying" and "potentially career-ending," then at least Colin Campbell and his striped boys had better figure it out soon - every day they don't is one more day a good hockey player could be removed from the game.

Fighting doesn't make the game more dangerous, you ignorant fucks. In fact, it can help keep the game safer. But a body of lawmakers (or, at the very least, enforcers) that thinks an honest, respectable fight is worse than a subtle attempt to end a career? That unquestionably makes it more dangerous. Next time, Derek Amell or Steve Barton (whichever linesman you were), back up, let the men fight like they're supposed to, skate away, get off the ice, and go home. There was probably a So You Think You Can Dance marathon that would have tided you over until kickoff at 1:00 the next day.