The National Hockey League will hold its hearing into Connor McDavid and Tyler Myers’ crosschecking incidents on Monday. Both hearing are in-person so the most either player can get is a four game suspension.
Two things are clear. First, that both players deserve suspension Second, that what Myers did was far more dangerous and unnecessary than what McDavid did, and deserves a far greater punishment.
But are NHL officials smart enough to recognize that?
Let’s first dig into Myers’ crosscheck to the face of Bouchard. It came as all the other players on the ice were squaring off in anger, though not uncontrolled fisticuffs. Way off to the side, Bouchard skated out to grab hold of the 6-foot, 8-inch giant Myer, as players will do to show they’re part of their team effort.
Out of nowhere, with no forewarning or obvious provocation, Myers maliciously cross-checked Bouchard right in the face.
Why the disproportionate response from Myers? What is wrong with him?
It’s not like Bouchard is known for fighting, let alone throwing the first punch. He’s a pacifist by NHL standards. Myers had to know he wasn’t facing up to Dave “The Hammer” Schultz here.
But the big Vancouver’s d-man brain evidently glitched. He reacted to Bouchard as if the Edmonton player were a deadly lion charging him.
Myers deserves at least a four game suspension for this assault, as dangerous as it was nutty.
And McDavid? Did he react rationally or like some kind of crazed, nutbar giraffe?
For 12 full seconds before he crosschecked Conor Garland in the side of the helmet, Garland has been mauling McDavid, first holding on to his arm and putting him a leg lock when they were on the ice, then after McDavid broke free, wrapping him up in various arm and head holds.
After the game, Garland did not try to hid his intent to illegally nullify the world’s best hockey player as Edmonton was pushing hard in the game’s final seconds to score the tying goal.
“I’m just holding him,” Garland told reporters. “I mean, he’s the best player to ever do it. So, the time’s running out. And I just thought that was maybe the best way for us to win a game was to do that. I don’t want to hurt him. (I) want to hold him and hurt him in that way. So, just try to get up and hold him down. But he’s a passionate guy. He’s a good dude. I mean, I don’t think he was… just his passion. It’s a tight game late in the game. Everybody has the fire in their belly trying to win a hockey game. So that’s the stuff that happens.”
The on-ice mugging by Garland comes a few games after Adrian Kempe viciously and dangerously slew footed McDavid. Just like Garland, Kempe go no penalty from the on-ice foul.
Garland and Kempe aren’t alone in the calculation that it often makes sense to foul McDavid rather than risk letting him score. It’s hard to imagine there’s a player who takes more hooks, holds, slashes, trips and interference plays than does McDavid. Some of the other top scorers, such as Nikita Kucherov and Nathan MacKinnon, likely face similar abuse.
But for all the illegal fouling that goes on, the players who are most likely to draw penalties in the NHL aren’t the uperstar attackers They are the league’s major agitators.
It makes sense that the most annoyingly aggressive players would draw a lot of penalties against them. They’re constantly infuriating the opposition, drawing their ire, which can lead to retaliatory penalties, as we saw in the Edmonton-Vancouver game with J.T. Miller crosschecked Bouchard in the back, which went unpenalized, but Bouchard got a penalty for coming back with a slash.
The referees tend to notice and crackdown on retaliation, just as they did in penalizing McDavid for his foul on Garland, but not Garland for his 12 seconds of non-stop fouling on McDavid.
None of the top 10 scorers in the NHL come close to drawing as many calls as do the league’s agitators. Top of the list re A.J. Greer, Garnet Hathaway, Ty Kartye, Mark Kastelic and Jordan Greenway, each of them drawing between 2.1 and 3.1 penalty per 60.
But the top five scorers at even strength on a rate basis? Tyler Seguin leads the league in scoring, 4.02 points per 60 ES minutes, but he ranks 546 out of 631 regular NHLers for penalties drawn with 0.24 per 60 ES.
Alex Ovechkin, who has the second highest ES rate of even strength scoring, has not drawn one penalty all year. Leon Draisaitl, third in scoring, ranks 79th for penalties drawn, 1.22 per game.
McDavid? He ranks 133rd overall for penalties drawn per 60, just 1.04 per 60 minutes of ES play. Kucherov ranks 95th and MacKinnon ranks 291st.
It’s evidently not an imperative to watch out for the NHL’s superstars, to make sure that lesser players aren’t constantly fouling them with impunity.
The stars have got to play their way through it, don’t you know.
They’ve got to fight through it.
They’ve got to earn their points.
Don’t they realize that hockey is a battle?
This is the NHL way. It’s the way of NHL bigwigs Colin Campbell and George Parros. Nothing will change until the NHL gets rid of leaders with this soft-on-crime philosophy.
Is it not time for a changing of the guard?
Other top sports such as the NFL and NBA go out of their way to protect their top stars from being fouled. They know it’s the superstars that sells tickets and win big and lucrative TV contracts, making everyone richer.
Perhaps that’s not yet occurred to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. Maybe Bettman, more than anyone else, has got to go before anything changes.
At the Cult of Hockey
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