Hmmm, I don't hear any righteous outrage from the FCC over the White House's
fake news segments. They paid actors to dress up and pretend to be news anchors and field reporters giving positive "news" stories about the White House's new Medicare reform bill. You know, that Medicare reform package that, after it was passed in both houses of congress, it was revealed that it was going to cost a few orders of magnitude more than the White House let on, and the one that gives HMOs and drug companies free reign to make our senior citizens bend over and take it like a a choir boy. Yeah, that's the one.
So, accordiing to the FCC, uttering the F-word, or any derivative of such, is a threat to the moral fabric of our proud nation. But using taxpayer money for the White House to disseminate patently fake propaganda disguised as journalism gets the okey-dokey? In-feckin'-credible!
And just for good measure, USAToday's ex-reporter Jack Kelley,
completely made up a bunch of his "news" stories...including stories that were up for Pulitzer Prizes.
Journalism, a career for which I was training during my high school years, has now just about reached the depths of selling used cars or being one of those "
Lionel Hutz"-type lawyers.
OK, so I finally saw a video clip that showed more than just the punch/blood/stretcher bit. The clip I saw showed a good part of the shift and I saw Todd Bertuzzi chasing Steve Moore around the ice, poking at him, and grabbing at him. Clearly, Bertuzzi was trying to goad Moore into a fight but Moore wasn't biting. So Bertuzzi grabs a handful of Moore's sweater and pulls him into a blind-sided roundhouse punch to the side of the head.
Moore went down like he'd been shot (the reports are he had lost consciousness as he was falling down). Bertuzzi landed on top of Moore's head/neck and as he was about to deliver another blow, an Avalanche player landed on Bertuzzi, driving him back into Moore's head and neck area. I cannot tell with any certainty if the significant share of Moore's injury happened the first time Bertuzzi landed on him, or when the Av's player landed on the both of them.
Those are--more or less--the facts I have, and what I am going to respond/react to. Because it's too damn easy to react to the blood or the sight of a guy with his upper body immobilized being carried off on a stretcher. When we see that, our first reaction is to throw the book at the sonofabitch who did this to him. To demand that he never play the game again--not even the old phart leagues--and to put him in prison on assault charges.
As to the assault charges (last I saw, the authorities in Vancouver were still looking into the matter), I have no opinion one way or the other, really. Because, as I said, I'm not sure if the initial contact is what put Steve Moore in hospital or if it was his own teammate crashing into him and Bertuzzi. Certainly, Bertuzzi's sucker punch was wrong, wrong, wrong. But it's not the first roundhouse sucker punch ever delivered in the history of hockey (and likely not the last). And the prosecutors don't go after
every player who delivers a sucker punch, or there would be a lot of busy prosecutors!
What the NHL did was suspend Bertuzzi for the rest of the season and the post season without pay (should cost him around $500,000). For now. This will be revisited by the league and Bertuzzi (and his representatives, of course) and any further punishment will be decided at the start of next season's training camp. (Assuming that there will, in fact, be a training camp--or even a season...but I'll get back to this in a moment.) The league also fined the Vancouver Canucks $250,000.
I completely agree with the Bertuzzi punishment. It gets him off the ice and he's crying away a big chunk of change. And waiting until the next '04-'05 training camp to revisit this means a couple of things: One, that all parties can see how Moore is doing...if it looks like he's making a full recovery and can play again, then maybe Bertuzzi's paroled. If Moore isn't doing so good, then they consider further punishment. And Two, it gives the league (and Bertuzzi) a sort of "out". With the state of the CBA talks (as in, they're not really happening), it's looking more and more like the NHL will go dark next season. And, as I've mentioned before, any work stoppage could last from a few weeks to two seasons. If the NHL suspends Bertuzzi for "one year" and the league goes dark all next season, what do they do? Do they consider it time served, or do they pick up that year after the league starts play again? So, as it stands, the league's punishment of Todd Bertuzzi is just.
But the league's treatment of the Vancouver Canucks, and specifically coach Marc Crawford--WEAK! I'll go along with fining the organization the $250k, but Crawford should also have been fined at
least $100,000 AND he should have been suspended for a minimum of ten games. When his own player (Brad May--who has his own history of head hunting) put a
BOUNTY on Steve Moore's head after Moore's hit on Vancouver captain Marcus Naslund a week or so earlier, Crawford (and Brian Burke, the Canucks GM) should have stepped in and put the keibash on the situation before it go so out of hand.
The NHL keeps talking about how they won't tolerate this kind of behaviour and these punishments (of players) are meant to set an example, well, dammit, set an example for hockey management! Make an example out of Burke and Crawford, that when their players start talking about putting a bounty on the other team's guy, you step in and make sure you have things under control! How hard is it for a coach to step up and tell the team, "look, I'm all for making sure the Avs know they can't knock our Captain around and get away with it, and if you can get Moore to 'go' with you, then go for it...but no head hunting!" I mean, for crying out loud, it took me 10 seconds to type that line...it should be brain-dead simple for a coach to utter it!
But I'll give the biggest share of my anger to the NHL itself. I am beginning to wonder if the league is really interested at all in trying to "fix" the problem(s) that causes players like Todd Bertuzzi to blow a gasket and do Really Stoopid/Bad Things. The amount of "head hunting" that has been going on in the last 8-10 years is staggering compared to the more rough-and-tumble "old time hockey" I grew up on. I remember 15-20 years ago a player who landed a vicious blow to another player's head was shocking, as was a player beings suspended for 10+ games.
Now, we can't seem to even get through a season without a lengthy suspension, and a ton of concussions and serious facial injuries from nasty blows to the head--the very thing the NHL vows every year to get under control.
A fairly strong case can be made for the league to do away with the "instigator" penalty (if you instigate a fight, you get an extra 2 minutes on top of the 5 minutes for fighting penalty). I don't have a set of statistics at hand on this, but based on my observation, the blows to the head and various other cheap shots have increased every year since this rule was put into effect. Because teams didn't get rid of their "goon" players. What happened is that these goon players now had a clear path to hunt down the other team's star players without fear of retribution. Oh, sure, sometimes they got called for the penalty, but most times the referee didn't see it because it was "behind the play."
So, the league voted to put TWO referees out on the ice. Let me just get this out of the way right off the hop: I've always
hated the extra ref on the ice. The ice was crowded enough before and now there's just one more set of eyes to miss (sometimes very blatant and obvious) penalties. So the goons still have almost free reign to hook, grab, slew-foot, elbow or do whatever else they think it takes to take the other team's star player(s) out of the game. If it gets
too out of hand, maybe the goon/enforcer on the star's team might decide to just take the instigator penalty and go after goon #1.
At the risk of sounding like the female Don Cherry, it used to be that if someone decided to take a cheap shot at, say, Wayne Gretzky or Jari Kurri, then the likes of Dave Semenko or Marty McSorley would be sure to introduce themselves to the offending player very quickly. Back then, the tough guys/enforcers/goons did a pretty good job of policing themselves. So, if it is possible to return to the days of the enforcer squad--and I'm not completely convinced it
is possible because there just isn't any respect shown by players today--then players could feel like they have some kind of control over the game and could take care of "hot spots" before they got out of hand (except for the occasional on-ice brawl, I suppose).
OK, so you don't like the idea of blowing away the instigator penalty, then I have another suggestion for the league to stem the tidal wave of head injuries and lengthy suspensions. Better sit down for this one, it's a really radical concept:
ENFORCE THE DAMN RULES!!!It's not as though the NHL doesn't have perfectly good rules that tell players they shouldn't smash their sticks over each other's heads, or put their elbows up their opponents' noses or rules against other such shennanigans (like the clutching/grabbing/interference that kills the game).
And what happens like clockwork every September is the league swears that this year they're
really gonna crack down on interference and head hunting and such. And for the first five or six weeks of the season the referees--as mandated by the league--blow their whistles every time Player A gets close enough to Player B to sniff out what he had for his pre-game meal. By the end of November, the whistles start getting put away. And when the playoffs start rolling around, the referees barely remember what that shiny thing in their hand is and what they're meant to do with it. Of course at this point the excuse they give for not making the penalty calls is that they "don't want to decide the outcome of the game." Well, aren't they deciding the outcome of a game by NOT calling penalties that should be called? If one team is playing reasonably close to the rules, but the other team is getting away with cheap shots and dangerous (and illegal) hits, isn't that putting team #1 at a disadvantage?
And then we have the problem of the two-referee system. As I've been saying all along, the second referee on the ice is a disaster. My friend
Chuq suggests taking the referee off the ice and putting him in the video booth. Give him the authority to call down to the ice and hand out penalties that the referee on the ice misses (and they miss an awful lot of them, it seems). I can go along with this, as long as penalties that are penalties in Game One are also penalties in Game Eighty-two and up. And there are still the problems of one team getting called for
everything while the other team gets away with mayhem, or one player getting a harsher penalty simply based on his history (instead of punishing the
penalty the referees punish on the reputation), or lettting a "marquee" player get away with slashing, etc., when other players get called for it.
Because it's this kind of inconsistency in enforcing the rules the NHL has on the books that leads to a lot of very confused and frustrated players, coaches and fans. When the fans get frustrated, they boo and occasionally throw beer out on the ice. When coaches get frustrated, they yell at the refs and occasionally throw a water bottle or a stick (or even a whole bench!) on the ice. When players get frustrated, they seek vigalante justice. Because, by God, if the referees won't protect the players, then they'll find a way to enforce their own safety and well-being themselves.
And that's when players do Very Stoopid-Bad Things.
So, just enforce the rules...if you're not supposed to smash a guy head-first into the boards in October, then why should you get away with it in March? Answer: You shouldn't get away with it.
Ever.
So there we have it: If the National Hockey League would just enforce their own rules consistently from player-to-player, team-to-team, period-to-period, game-to-game, month-to-month, season-to-season (and post-season), I'd be willing to bet a lot of these problems would disappear.
All that said, I wish Steve Moore a speedy recovery. I've read that he'll be moved to a hospital in Denver this weekend and hope it's an indication that he's well on the mend.
