By Steven Lienert
Usually to get hockey highlights, I don't have to turn on Sportscenter until 45 minutes into the program. It seems to follow figure skating but comes on just before Ultimate Frisbee.
That was until the other night, when the Sabres and Senators led the show. It reminded me what makes hockey great.
Fighting.
Hockey's dying and it needs to get back to its roots to jump-start it' popularity again.
Let's call this Fighters Anonymous. Be honest here -- even the most fringe hockey fan at least took a peek at Sabres-Senators II to see if there was any payback for what happened a few nights earlier.
And there was. And it was awesome. And if there's a God, the Sabres and Senators will meet in a seven-game bloodbath for the Eastern Conference crown.
Because that's what hockey needs. It's the only sport where, if you fight, they put you in a little box for five minutes to cool down.
In baseball, if you fight, you're kicked out of the game and suspended. In basketball, not only do you not know how to fight, the fans will kick your ass, you'll get kicked out of the game, you'll get made fun of on television and you'll get suspended.
Fighting in football is just dumb because everybody wears helmets. Duh. And if you're one of those guys that takes his helmet off during an altercation, you deserve what you get. But I digress.
The new rules that hockey adopted after the lockout freed up the skill players but almost made the Hockey Goon an extinct species. Now, however, there are signs fighting is coming back in vogue.
Donald Brashear, late of the Philadelphia Flyers, was signed by the Caps to 'protect' the organization's investment in Alex Ovechkin. He just inked an extension with Washington.
And in Pittsburgh (and soon-to-be Portland), with people taking more liberties with Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, the Penguins traded for the current heavyweight champion of the NHL, Georges Laraque. Brashear vs. Laraque: here's hoping the Pens and Caps meet in the first round.
This should be music to Flyers' fans ears. That is, if the Flyers actually had a decent fighter. Or a decent team. Remember the Flyers-Senators brawl in 2004? Of course you do -- Comcast Sportsnet ran a special replay of the entire game for two straight days.
Why? Because hockey fans, especially Flyers fans, love brawls. They love the Broad Street Bullies, beating Russian Red Army teams into submission, goalies dropping the gloves and Ron Hextall starting fights.
Who could forget the Red Wings and Avalanche -- when Detroit went after Claude Lemieux in revenge after Lemieux rearranged Chris Draper's face with a 'check' along the boards during the playoffs six months prior? Everybody on the Red Wings had to fight. It's part of the code.
If hockey wants to get off OLN or, uh, Versus, or Prism or whatever it's called this week, please let teams take cheap shots against the skill players. And let the Goons take the ice and do their job.
It keeps the players in check. Hockey's the only sport where if you break the rules, the referee isn't the only one handing out the punishment. It's what makes it great.
Lienert likes to drop the gloves at slienert@phanaticmag.com
1 comment:
Having been a hockey fan since the Blues first came to St. Louis back in 1960s, I can remember the excitement the first time Barclay Plager dropped the glove with Real Lemieux. Everyone was standing and screaming, then the game resumed right after the fight with a new sense of excitement – I was hooked.
The hook has slowly been releasing itself ever since Gary Bettman and his band of “knowing what’s right for hockey” group decided to take fighting out of the game. Between rule changes and some obvious “moral suasion”, the nature of the game has changed and for the first time in 4 decades, I no longer hold season tickets.
The Detroit Red Wings are the best example of everything wrong in hockey today. They have many players that thrive in today’s no-retribution environment. Chris Chelios is allowed to continue a career of the worst cheap shots, punches when no one is looking, third-man in activity in the history of the game – with no retribution. Tomas Holmstrom is allowed to bump, screen and worse to the goalies that were once untouchable in the old NHL – with no retribution. Kirk Maltby is allowed to run around and annoy people – with no retribution.
Of course they feel no need to have a tough guy, they’d rather whine and cry and then score on the power play. Are they wrong to do so? Not in today’s Donald Trump world of do whatever is necessary to win – even if it destroys the very system in which you thrive.
I can only hope that writers like you can remind the people that run the NHL what made hockey unique and exciting to new fans like the 14-year old boy I was when the St. Louis Blues first took the ice in St. Louis.
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