James Mirtle: The Bertuzzi incident and Mr. Laraque – A hockey journalist’s blog

James Mirtle: The Bertuzzi incident and Mr. Laraque – A hockey journalist’s blog:


Now, in the wake of an ugly incident between the Edmonton Oilers’ Georges Laraque and Los Angeles Kings’ Sean Avery, the Bertuzzi incident is being brought up as something that deterred possible on-ice violence.

Laraque said he considered going after Avery on the ice after the alleged slur but, in the wake of the Todd Bertuzzi situation with Steve Moore, decided to let the NHL deal with it. Laraque talked to Oilers GM Kevin Lowe and NHL chief of operations Colin Campbell about the incident.

good, if true. The tendency of players to “take things into their own hands” (i.e., vigilante ‘justice’ usually based on some unwritten ‘code’ that varies based on who’s pissed off about what and how much they’re paid) is one of the key things limit the NHL from being more interesting to a mainstream sports audience.

It’s actually tied up into so many things — the league tolerance of fighting, but also, the league’s willingness to “let the boys play” and “not deciding the game” (code for: you can win the game not by being better, but by being willing to play dirtier), by the third period whistle-swallow, by not calling penalties during power plays — the list goes on.

If the referees called the rules, and if there were strong penalties for transgressing those rules, and those rules were reliably enforced and consistently applied, the role of “policeman” goes away. Scott Parker is a Shark not because Brad Stuart got mugged and seriously injured — but because the league didn’t deal with the mugging in any serious way.

I’m not anti-fighting, but I recognize that fighting gives the mass media easy video clips for the 11PM news, and a legitimate reason to not take hockey seriously — fights break out in football and basketball, and sissyfights in baseball — but only in hockey are they accepted as part of the game, and fighters given hero status well beyond their skill level (don’t believe me? sit in san jose arena any time Scott Parker has his jersey off — the crowd appreciates that on more than one level)

But fighting also is an indicator of worse problems — the biggest being hat the league has bought into the idea that the referee isn’t actually in charge of the game. He was supposed to “let the boys play” and “not decide the game” (HUH?), which really means don’t call penalties that actually happen. Um, think about that for a minute. To borrow from a famous philosopher, “no action is still an action”. Choosing to NOT call a penalty still is deciding the game, you simply change the bias towards the person who gets away with the infraction — and if you want to know how the NHL into the sad state of hockey it had before the lockout, that’s how: by buying into stupid idea that swallowing the whistle somehow made the game better. In fact, it encouraged dirty play, waterskiing defensemen, thugging in the slot and the whole grab/pin/hogtie routine — because if you know you can break the rules and get away with it, you will, because it gives you an advantage.

So now, the league’s reset the rules back to where they want to pretend they always were — and they need to have the backbone to do so — and if they do, then yes, as James says, it’s a new NHL, and policemen and fighting will fade away. But if the refs start swallowing the whistle again when the whiners start whining (Hello, chris chelios to the white discourtesy phone, please) about penalties at key moments, then you’ll see a return to ugly hockey and fighting.

If the league does ITS job, teams have no need for enforcers. I wish I really believed the league understood this. So far, I’m encouraged — but only time will tell. But I’ve seen a good number of penalty shots and 5on3 sitautions already this season, and that, to me, indicates they really have told the refs to stop calling games sitautionally. Here’s hoping it continues.

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