Todd Bertuzzi and Steve Moore.

It is a difficult day to be a hockey fan today. I just happened to be watching (on and off) the Colorado/Vancouver game last night; I was priviledged to see Bertuzzi’s mugging of Steve Moore.

He who lives by the testosterone occasionaly dies by it, and last night, Bertuzzi, who’s game always has an edge to it, fell off the cliff and did something really stupid. I’ll bet he feels horrible about the results; players intend to send messages, not that. But it’s too late for remorse, it doesn’t change the act. Echos of McSorley’s hit on Donald Brashear, or perhaps even moreso Owen Nolan’s hit on Hurricane Grant Marshall in 2001 (which led to an 11 game, well earned, suspension).

Todd Bertuzzi shouldn’t skate the rest of the season. If it were up to me, he wouldn’t skate the first round of the playoffs, either — you not only have to punish Bertuzzi for this, you have to send a message to ALL teams in the NHL that this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated. They way you do that is not taking away the instigator penalty as some experts propose, that solution only leads to this kind of violence, not away from it.

No, you do it by reacting to these events in ways that hurt the team — and it’s too late in the season to impact the Canuck’s playoff situation significantly, so you have to suspend Bertuzzi in a way that impacts the Canuck’s ability to succeed in the playoffs. If you suspend him for ten games, or the rest of the season, all you do is give Vancouvre a rested, healthy Bertuzzi (one looking for redemption) to start the playoffs. If I’m Bryan Burke, I take that suspension and giggle all the way to the conference finals.

How do we get to these situations? Referees are told to not decide the game. which still decides the game, since choosing to not call a penalty still affects the game — but slants the result to those that are willing and able to push beyond the rules, because they know they’ll get away with it.

The real culprit here is a lack of responsibility by the league office to police play in the league. They under-enforce the game during normal gameplay, allowing tempers to flare and emotions to rise beyond acceptable levels. Then they clamp down heavily, which merely increases the frustration. And eventually, it leaks out sideways.

The reason hockey experts are calling for the removal of the instigator rule is not because that’s the solution to these problems: it’s because they’re convinced the league (through the referees and all that way to the top of the league office) won’t accept the responsibility to police the game, so teams feel they have to police it themselves. And they’re probably right, too. And that sucks.

Teams should not feel the need to police the game, or have policemen on their roster to protect their stars. That they do is an indictment of the league at the highest levels — and it leads to things like what happened last night.

And real hockey fans should be disgusted at this, because this is the death of the game, not the essence.

For a view from Vancouver, here is the reasoned voice of some friends of ours who are today, very sad to call themselves Canucks fans.

update: Off Wing chimes in.

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