Sometimes silence is a deafening roar. The NHL yesterday made a decision not to even hold a disciplinary hearing for the Detroit Redwings Todd Bertuzzi after he was given a 5 minute major and a game misconduct for elbowing the Chicago Blackhawks Ryan Johnson. The reek hypocrisy and maddening inconsistency of taking such a non stance after making a league wide whipping boy out of Matt Cooke, banishing him from play for the rest of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs, is absolutely bewildering.
As Burress pointed out here in the wake of the Cooke suspension, Bertuzzi is the one guy in the league with a bigger reputational footprint from being a dirty player than Cooke himself.
“Irony would also rear it's beautifully hideous head when Matt Cooke would serve the first game of his suspension against a Red Wings team featuring the aforementioned Bertuzzi. Prior to the game, Red Wings Alternate Captain Henrik Zetterberg weighed in on the Cooke situation calling for Cooke to be shelved for the remainder of the season and much like everything else in the NHL, the Red Wings got their wish. Zetterberg clearly overlooked the fact that his choir boy organization employs a guy who once came up behind another human being, grabbed him by the back of his sweater, wound up, and delivered a gloved punch to the back of his head sending him plummeting to the ice face first. The result was merely a concussion, 3 broken neck vertebrae, facial lacerations, and 5 months in a hospital plus a year in a neck brace. Nothing major, I guess. Heck the most storied Red Wing ever, Mr. Hockey himself, was known to throw an elbow or 10 during his career, so at least they have that going for them!”
“For all of Steve Moore and his family's suffering, Todd Bertuzzi was suspended for only 3 more games than Matt Cooke for an elbow that didn't even sideline a guy for a period. Since the "Steve Moore Incident" Bertuzzi has played in nearly 400 NHL games and pocketed nearly $18 million dollars for his troubles while Steve Moore can skate, but that's about it. While his neck has healed but he still suffers from the concussion he received when Todd Bertuzzi held the back of his jersey, cocked his fist, and sucker punched him in the back of the head so hard that he fell helplessly to the ice face first and unconscious. For that, Bertuzzi got only 3 more games than Matt Cooke for his stupidity in finishing a check with a dirty elbow. Get my drift?”
And yet despite that history and prior reputation, and the heralded new found revelatory focus and immense attention paid to protecting players from vicious, brutal, concussing headshots, the league DID NOT BAT AN EYEBROW OR RAISE ITS TINIEST FINGER toward an incident that was similar in every way shape and manner to the elbow that Cooke put into McDonagh’s cranium. That duplicitous roar you are hearing is absolutely deafening. And please, spare me any sort of super slow motion instant replay analysis and breakdown establishing intention and intricacies of the incidents at hand. The bottom line: both guys were trying to finish checks after the puck had left, and both ended up inserting their elbow directly into the skull of the opposing player.
If the NHL is serious about eliminating headshots, they must take a hard stance on these flying elbows as they do on high sticks. From my understanding of the league’s rules in that situation, it is that the player responsible for wielding his stick must be in control of it at all times, and any contact, even the most unintentional and incidental, with an opposing player is an automatic penalty. Of course, my understanding of such a solid rule was brought into question last night when James Neal of the Penguins was clipped in the face by Claude Giroux of the Flyers. Giroux was following through on the puck and, under his own power, lifted his stick into Neal’s mouth and cut his lip. Instead of an ensuing 4 minute power play, the officials on the ice huddled and waived off the infraction. It was a fitting end to a perfectly baffling day.
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