Weekly Links: Shea Weber signing indicates financial disparities between NHL teams; Homophobic hockey reporter gets criticized; Updates on the Jacob Trouba saga

July 22, 2012 by Leave a comment

Image from: http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/images/sports/photos/2012/07/19/940-weber-8col.jpg

Welcome to Hockey in Society’s Weekly Links post. This feature highlights articles or blog entries that are related to Hockey in Society’s areas of interest and that may be of interest to the site’s readers.

Hockey Links

  • Shea Weber signed a massive offer sheet with the Philadelphia Flyers. Adam Proteau examines the disparity between large market teams such as the Flyers and small market teams such as the Nashville Predators. [The Hockey News]
  • Meanwhile, James Mirtle answers the question: “Why [do] NHL teams cry poor despite the league’s record growth?” A very interesting read about the distribution of revenue between teams. [Globe and Mail]
  • Good post comparing Gary Bettman’s rhetorical two-stepping about concussions in hockey with the tobacco industry’s tactics to defend itself against criticism. [The Hockey Writers]
  • A journalist for the Niagara Falls Reporter published a homophobic defense of fighting in hockey: “The NHL’s abominable, “You Can Play” promotion, which all but endorses homosexuality in hockey, is among its top priorities. Thanks to Gary Bettman and his ilk, enforcers are out, but gays are in. . . . Fortunately for Sabres fans, the team has not come out of the closet and the signing of tough guy, John Scott is an indication there might be some shred of manliness left in an otherwise emasculated organization.” Brutal. [Niagara Falls Reporter]
  • Reaction in the hockey blogosphere was swift, with many jumping to condemn the reporter and the newspaper. Pensions Plan Puppets was among the first to respond. [Pension Plan Puppets]
  • Chris Peters is doing a great job covering the recruiting scandal involving the Kitchener Rangers of the OHL and Jacob Trouba, who has committed to play at Michigan University next year. First up, some info about the Rangers suing the student newspaper that broke this story. [United States of Hockey]
  • Next up, Peters provides a helpful overview of the competition between NCAA and CHL teams to recruit talented players to their respective leagues. A very good read to understand the complexity of the recruitment process. [United States of Hockey]
  • Former Colorado Avalanche enforcer Scott Parker gave a lengthy two-part interview to Mile High Hockey that, amongst many other issues, provides some fascinating insights into “the Code” in hockey when Parker discusses Todd Bertuzzi’s infamous attack on Steve Moore. [Mile High Hockey: Part I and Part II]
  • The interview drew a number of responses from the hockey blogosphere. Jake Goldsbie had a good post about the culture of violence in hockey, including Parker’s assessment of Moore. [Backhand Shelf]
  • Will the New York Islanders move to Brooklyn? John Imossi gives five reasons why it could happen. [The Hockey Writers]
  • Greg Wyshynski explains how the NHL’s TV various deals may help reduce the possibility of a lockout. [Puck Daddy]
  • Brandon Worley has a review of Goon. If you missed it in March, I also recommend checking out Matt and Marty’s review of the film on this blog. [Defending Big D]
  • Finally, some very sad news: Jessica Ghawi (AKA Jessica Redfield), a hockey blogger and aspiring sport journalist, was among those killed at the recent shooting at a Colorado movie theatre. She was known by many hockey bloggers and her passing inspired many moving tributes. RIP Jessica. [Puck Daddy; United States of Hockey]

General Sport Links

  • Penn State finally removed the statue of Joe Paterno from its campus. [TSN]
  • Dave Zirin has an interesting and persuasive argument against abolishing the Penn State football program. [Edge of Sports]
  • The NBA votes to place adverts on jerseys. Yikes. How long until the NHL follows suit? [Globe and Mail]

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Talking Hockey and Don Cherry at the “Bodies of Knowledge” Conference at the University of Toronto

April 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

Bodies of Knowledge (BOK) is an annual graduate student conference held at the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education at University of Toronto. The conference is entirely organized and run by graduate students (full disclosure: I am on the organizing committee and am presenting, so this post is somewhat self-promotional) and all presentations are by graduate students from Ontario and abroad.

The conference aims to bring a multidisciplinary approach to exploring sport, physical activity, exercise, and the human body. Disciplinary perspectives include sociology, cultural studies, physiology, kinesiology, motor control, psychology, and education.

This year’s conference takes place on May 3-4. If you are interested in attending, please visit the conference website for more details.

Unfortunately the hockey content is quite light this year in comparison to past years, with only one presentation – a paper by Hockey in Society contributor and UBC graduate student Courtney Szto and I. Courtney and I will be presenting on some research we have done on Don Cherry and his Coach’s Corner program.

Read more of this post

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The Dept. of Player Safety: Further proof that the ‘Code’ no longer exists?

April 3, 2012 by 8 Comments

There is no shortage of critiques of Brendan Shanahan and his oxymoronic Department of Player Safety.  Speaking in his suit from his CNN like ‘war room’, Shanahan offers a very inhuman and sterilized account of some of the most atrocious hits in hockey. He stands, sans emotion, and delivers a verdict as a judge would to a convicted criminal.  The only difference is that unlike Law & Order, we neither hear the uproar of the crowd when they are unhappy with the ruling, nor the reaction of the offender to his sentencing (or lack thereof).

Image from http://i.ytimg.com/vi/SdPNADM3Olg/0.jpg

The Department of Player Safety is supposed to act like a prison watchtower, keeping order without having to actually impose its will.  It is what social theorist Michel Foucault would call a panopticon.  It surveils without being seen.  It governs from a distance.  The only problem with Shanahan’s panopticon is that there is no fear attached to being surveilled.  Players almost laugh in the face of his youtube videos.  As articulated in this article, The NHL is a Joke! Player safety the biggest oxymoron:

In many ways, Shanahan continues to condone the worst that hockey offers by merely shuffling players about with regular season suspensions and fails miserably by not removing the most reprehensible behaviours and attitudes from players that are more than willing to damage another player’s brain. His suspensions, while more lengthy than his incompetent predecessor’s, and his video explanations, while more clear in their reasonings, do not, and will not, stop the impunity that many NHL players have towards one another.

In other words, what is the incentive for any player to think twice? For anyone who has read Freakonomics or Superfreakonomics, you will remember that the authors rely heavily on personal incentive as indicators for rational behaviour.  As an example, if the punishment for drunk driving were random road-blocks that would result in execution on the spot, surely more people would think twice before getting behind the wheel.  The Department of Player Safety neither strikes fear in the minds of those who have multiple offenses to their names nor does it make any other player feel like their safety is well protected from the NHL executive offices. Read more of this post

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Brian Burke’s Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

January 7, 2012 by 5 Comments

When Kanye West dropped a bomb on the musical world in 2010 with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, music critics lost their collective shit trying to process, internalize and communicate what they had just absorbed. So sprawling and epic, so contradictory, so unabashed in its assessments was the album that it could really only be accepted as an actual Dark Fantasy. And Kanye could only be lauded for having the guts, the audacity, the talent and, dare I say it, the truculence to put it all out there.

All of which means that Brian Burke is now the Kanye West of hockey. There, I said it.

This week Burke unleashed a press conference on the hockey world that was so spectacularly abrasive that it cut right to the heart of the issue. Watching it was not unlike watching Louis CK’s sitcom (just named by TIME as the best tv show of 2011); we recognize the form but not the content in that form. Nor the aesthetic. And as a result, it penetrates to a degree that we’re unprepared for. I finished watching Burke’s presser with that same degree of unsettled admiration – and slightly drooling tongue – that I get from watching Louis.

If you haven’t seen Burke’s performance, go watch it. Then read Mark Norman’s post on this site for an incisive analysis. If you’re still interested after all that, here is what it said to me:

Fundamentally, Burke reminded us in no uncertain terms that professional hockey is designed to be a fantasy world. A serious one at that. We are often led to believe that sports like hockey are some kind of microcosm of society, or a world in which life’s lessons are learned, or even a place where eternal themes are played out. Y’know, ‘sport is the best reality show’ and all that (crap). Burke ground those theories into a pulp by making an impassioned and eloquent plea to maintain the unapologetic exceptionalism of hockey culture. He told the rest of us that the world professional hockey has carved out – a spectacularly and uniformly gendered world of character, pride and honour – can no longer maintain the barriers and boundaries that it has painstakingly established.

(Hypothetical exchange)

Outraged citizen – ‘You can’t hit someone in a bar and not go to jail! So why can you hit someone in a hockey game and it’s fine?’  (BTW – I’ve said this to students in university classes on more than one occasion)

Brian Burkes of the world – ‘Because this is hockey. It’s a dark, fantasy world reserved for a few. You’re invited to watch, but don’t tell us what to do. We’ve made an alternative reality where we understand the rules. And you’ve loved the spectacle of it for decades.’

Yet, now the curtain is being drawn back (Why? Because of concussions? Derek Boogard? Crosby’s brain? I’m not sure we can pinpoint it) and Burke wants us to know that he’s not in a position to keep it pulled tight. His description and treatment of this yellow brick road that he now finds himself on was truly captivating. He openly explored and embraced the tension between the pressure to keep up with trends within the game versus the costs to the sanctity and romance of hockey logic. He nobly (and contradictorily) re-committed himself to player safety and protection by refusing to play off fighting against brain health in some kind of best-of-seven morality series. He acknowledged and openly cheered for the incredible excitement of NHL hockey in 2012, with so many young superstars whose skill sets are revolutionizing styles of play. He also called out the supposed moral superiority of the NHL’s current justice system in which the league polices players and tells players they are not able to do it for themselves. And he did it all with an eloquence and gravitas that can only mean that it is now officially impossible to watch Coach’s Corner ever again.

(It also must be noted that he pulled the whole thing off ‘wearing’ a perfectly placed un-tied tie that somehow signaled that this was a special occasion. As if it was some kind of  ‘last minute’ meeting in the biggest, most prestigious hockey market in the world to announce the demotion of a fourth liner to the minors. F’ing brilliant.)

And the last, but by no means least, accomplishment is that in 10 minutes Brian Burke forced the anti-fighting crowd – the ‘Greenpeacers’ in his parlance – to re-evaluate the stability of their collective soapbox. I know because I’m one of them. Case in point: I wanted so desperately for the Canucks to win the Cup last year not just because they’re my team but also because it became for me an ideological battle between the Big Bad Bruins and the sweet skating Swedes. Eventually, though, it also became a series in which true hatred rained down around the villainous archetypes of the hockey world that are Brad Marchand and Max Lapierre. And Burke is warning us that an unintended consequence of the new NHL could be the continued ascension of these characters. Can fighting actually prevent any of this, particularly given that the referees in the Bruins/Canucks series were so clearly ineffective when it came to doing so? I don’t know. Burke has made me think about it, though.

I am de-stabilized. I know that the code has always ostensibly been built on respect. Respect for violence, pain, sacrifice, and retribution. (Not exactly the top of the dominant moral hierarchy). So I dismissed the code, and still largely do.  It wasn’t until Brian Burke called my attention to this twisted fantasy world of hockey with such conviction that I was willing to think it over in any intellectual way.

Take that, Kanye.

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Brian Burke Laments Decline of the Enforcer, Fears that “Rats” Will Dominate Hockey: What Does This Tell Us About Hockey Culture?

January 5, 2012 by 1 Comment

Image from: http://www.sportsnet.ca

Brian Burke, the General Manager for the Toronto Maple Leafs, has never been one to shy away from the media spotlight or to hide his emotions. Nor has Burke made any secret about his view that a good NHL team requires a solid dose of toughness on its roster, famously declaring upon taking the Maple Leafs GM job in 2008:

We require, as a team, proper levels of pugnacity, testosterone, truculence and belligerence. That’s how our teams play. . . . Our teams play a North American game. We’re throwbacks. It’s black-and-blue hockey. It’s going to be more physical hockey here than people are used to.

Burke backed up his words in the following years, trading away a number of skilled players and bringing in noted enforcers such as Colton Orr and Mike Brown in an effort to create a tougher on-ice team. Today, after Colton Orr was sent to the Maple Leafs’ minor league team, Burke weighed in on the current state of the game and lamented the decline of enforcers in hockey.

After the jump, I look at Burke’s statements and consider what they say about hockey’s culture of aggressive masculine behaviour, “the Code” that informally governs how players are expected to conduct themselves, the widely held assumption that players can police their on-ice actions better than the NHL can through suspensions or fines, and the need to disconnect an enforcer’s personal attributes from his on-ice role.

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Hockey Fighting and the Justice Loving Soul

December 16, 2011 by 5 Comments


Bob Probert. Image from: The Bleacher Report's "25 Best Tough Guy Hockey Pictures"

Like most people I stood up, rising off my feet a bit, when the circling, diffuse hive of the game would suddenly stop and, somewhere behind the play, the focus would grow static, with the crowd collectively gasping before collectively cheering as the brawlers circled each other and closed in. I was raised with a healthy, if somewhat patronizing, respect for the local fighting hero, Bob Probert, or “Probie,” whose gap-toothed smile revealed what to like about him: the gaps displayed the toughness, but the smile was what told you he was on your side, that he’d only ever hurt the other guys, in defense of you and your team’s honour.

Don’t dismiss the honour. “The Code” that justifies hockey fighting might be mostly a myth, but even so it is powerful, effective, and asks for just a little periodic justification to keep it afloat. So when Claude Lemieux savagely reconstructed Kris Draper’s face in 1997 at the end of an already decided playoff series, “The Code” took a good long look at itself in the mirror: time to spruce up old boy, they’ll be laying out the red carpet for you soon. And did they ever. The next spring the wrong had their honour restored by the blood on Patrick Roy’s face, prominently displayed the next morning on the front page of the newspaper, and in the everlasting shame of Lemieux, who was ever so willing to check a man from behind but turned cowardly away from Darren McCarty’s frontier justice. From this, a team’s bond was forever strengthened, and a few months later they’d bring the cup home for the first time in half a century. All was morally right in the universe.

So the story goes. Claude Lemieux’s comeuppance is just one dramatic episode in the long myth that supports hockey fighting. Lesser examples are not hard to find. Ryan Miller got hit by Lucic: The Code dictates that Lucic should now have his face smashed in by some goliath. Etc, etc. As you know, this myth is losing steam for a few reasons, including the mounting evidence that fighting exacts a terrible, sometimes life-threatening, toll on the fighters and the fact that now teams can hardly afford to save a roster spot for a guy with few actual hockey skills. But there’s something else going on too, something embedded in the morality behind the myth that made fighting acceptable in the first place, that deserves attention. The medical and strategic trends moving against hockey fighting enter the discussion from outside the moral framework that justifies fighting, so if those are the reasons fighting is ultimately abandoned, there is the threat that that moral framework might escape the proper examination it deserves.

So let’s have a look at that. As we’ve seen, part of the draw of hockey fighting is that it is justified by a moral framework in which your Gretzky or your Crosby are the damsel in distress who must be guarded by the goon in shining armour. But how often, really, is that the cause of a fight? And if protection were the real motive behind fighting, if we really did value fighting for its positive moral ramifications, how would that look? I suspect it would be a rather dour affair, with your average fans interior monologue running something like “truly unfortunate that their third line winger took a run at our star, now he shall have to be subjected to the most brutal of punishments: bludgeoning by knuckle. Too bad, but it must be done. I can hardly stand to watch, but it must be done, for justice’s sake.” Read more of this post

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Weekly Links: Canadian Forces Muzzle the Jets; Sidney Crosby Returns from Concussion; Frontier Justice Prevails in Buffalo

November 25, 2011 by Leave a comment

Image from: http://theglobeandmail.com

Welcome to Hockey in Society’s Weekly Links post. This feature highlights articles or blog entries that are related to Hockey in Society’s areas of interest and that may be of interest to the site’s readers.

Hockey Links

  • Well this is interesting: by settling on a military themed logo, the Winnipeg Jets signed a contract with the Department of National Defense stating that they cannot use the logo in a manner that reflects poorly upon the Canadian Forces or the Queen. While I can’t imagine a professional hockey team taking a strong anti-establishment political stance (although the Phoenix Suns provide a rare professional sport aberration in this regard) it is still interesting that the military can control the actions of a privately-owned team that is, in many ways, also seen as a public good. [Globe and Mail]
  • An interesting story, particularly in light of the interview we published yesterday: two women who formerly played youth hockey in Brampton win a Human Rights Tribunal case over their treatment as youth players. Both girls faced a range of discriminatory actions from teammates and coaches, and their mother was removed as a volunteer with the Brampton Youth Hockey Association after speaking out in defense of her daughters. [The Star]
  • Brendan Shanahan, the NHL’s rookie VP Player Safety, is pleased with players’ adaptation to his stricter enforcement of unsafe rule violations. Wait, is he saying that league enforcement is actually creating behaviour change? I thought the players sorted it out and self-policed and everything was great. No? [TSN]
  • To the surprise of exactly no-one who has an even cursory understanding of “the Code”, the first game between the Buffalo Sabres and Boston Bruins since Milan Lucic concussed Sabres’ goalie Ryan Miller featured fisticuffs galore. Harrison Mooney approves. [Puck Daddy]
  • David Shoalts reports on the Sabres/Bruins game, including some interesting tidbits and quotations about “honour” and “duty”, and the possibility that discipline is easing since NHL GMs criticized Brendan Shanahan. [Globe and Mail]
  • The Globe and Mail’s editor believes that Sidney Crosby’s return marks a turning point in awareness about concussions in hockey. I’ll believe it when I see it. [Globe and Mail]
  • Meanwhile, the two players who concussed Crosby will breathe a little easier now that he has returned. [The Star]
  • Bruce Dowbiggen with an interesting look at what Crosby means in terms of marketability for the NHL. [Globe and Mail]
  • The City of Markham, just northeast of Toronto, has plans to build a 19,500 seat arena not necessarily, but possibly, with a long-term eye to wooing an NHL team. It will be very interesting to watch this unfold for a variety of reasons, from local politics (are taxpayers expected to foot the bill?) to NHL politics (will the Maple Leafs enforce their monopoly on all professional hockey in the Greater Toronto Area?) to issues of (sub)urban economic and social development (or lack thereof). [TSN and The Hockey News]

General Sport Links

  • The Economist‘s sports blog explores – and debunks – the notion that anti-Christian sentiment is behind the widespread criticism of Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow. [Game Theory]
  • This is a little old, but an interesting take on the media coverage of Tebow. Looking at how criticism of Tebow: the person misses critiquing the bigger picture of Tebow: the symbol of a messed-up corporate/politically influenced sports world. [E. Martin Nolan]
  • Also from The Economist sports blog, an interesting examination of labour issues in Australian Rules Football, whose popularity has mushroomed in the past few years. Unlike many North American sport leagues, in which athletes earn roughly 50% of revenue, AFL players earn just a quarter of revenue. [Game Theory]
  • The Conference Board of Canada has released a report examining the possibility of expansion in the Canadian Football League. The most likely municipal candidates: Ottawa, Quebec City, London, Moncton, Halifax, and Kitchener-Waterloo. [Conference Board of Canada]
  • Sepp Blatter, for all his faults, has agreed to remain in charge of FIFA for four more years. Really FIFA? [The Star]

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The Problems with Frontier Justice in Hockey: An Open Letter to The Hockey News

November 20, 2011 by 2 Comments

Image from: http://nytimes.com

This afternoon I sent a letter to the editor of The Hockey News in response to this article by Ryan Kennedy, in which he advocates for “frontier justice” in light of the recent Milan Lucic hit on Ryan Miller – a topic recently discussed by courtneyszto here on Hockey in Society. The full text of the letter is reproduced below:

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to Ryan Kennedy’s article “Advocating for Frontier Justice”, posted on The Hockey News website on November 16. The letter left me dumbfounded, as it advocated for bully tactics that have proven time and time again to be extremely damaging to hockey players and to contribute to a broader culture of violence in the sport. I would like to think that Mr. Kennedy was writing satirically, but his passion for retaliatory violence seems genuine and last time I checked he is a writer for The Hockey News, not The Onion.

Mr. Kennedy essentially yearns for a return to the mythologized glory days where players policed themselves by an unwritten honour code, in which actions that transgressed “the Code” were punished by further retaliatory violence. This is a tired argument that Canadians, at least, have had verbally beaten into them through Don Cherry’s weekly trips to his Coach’s Corner bully pulpit. It is an argument that not only charts very dubious ethical ground, but one that also romanticizes the past at the expense of critically assessing the social and health impacts of self-policed hockey. Do we really want more Dino Ciccarelli stick attacks? Or Broad Street Bullies gang attacks that beat opponents into submission? Or, for a more contemporary example, more Todd Bertuzzi revenge hits? Because those actions are the logical extension of what Mr. Kennedy proposes.

Mr. Kennedy even happily admits that innocent victims – those who have done nothing to violate “the Code” but who happen to be on the same team as someone who has – should be targets for retaliation in this grand system of self-policed and “honourable” hockey. As Mr. Kennedy so eloquently and bloodthirstily puts it, “If . . . your goaltender just got steamrolled, but you can’t get at the perp, why not just beat the crap out of the guy nearest to you?” I cannot begin to tell you how pleasing it is to hear such humane and rational arguments coming from one of the most influential hockey publications in the world

I have a number of other issues with Mr. Kennedy’s suggestions, but I will focus here on just two. Firstly, Mr. Kennedy seems to glorify a world in which physical dominance equals success, in which the weak can and should be bullied, and in which manly men fight, literally, to climb to the top of this Darwinian heap. If such is the worldview of Mr. Kennedy, or The Hockey News, then that is a sad social vision indeed. While one can argue that “it’s just hockey” and therefore has no broader implications, such an argument ignores the complex ways in which sport and society interact and influence each other. It also forgets the exponentially higher number of hockey players who do not make the NHL compared with those who do – and leaves unanswered the questions about what happens to the kings of the minor or junior hockey jungles when their hockey careers are cut short. Are the lessons these young men are learning in such a physically brutal environment – that strength is superiority, that violence is an acceptable solution to problems, that stereotypically masculine codes of behaviour are clearly better than the alternatives offered by women or “unmanly” men – really the social attitudes with which our athletic youth should be entering adulthood?

Secondly, Mr. Kennedy seems entirely happy to have the NHL take a regulatory step back from the game and let the players police themselves. He states that “you may balk at frontier justice, but it’s still justice – and that’s always better than law.” Does that mean that law precludes justice? Can’t we have both? Rather than criticizing Buffalo Sabres players for not attacking Milan Lucic (or his linemates who had nothing to do with running Ryan Miller) because this would have been a form of “justice” in light of the NHL’s decision not to punish Lucic, why not criticize the league itself for being too toothless to enforce its own rules and to create safe conditions for its players to work in? Should we accept an NHL that is too cowardly to take violence seriously and that is happy to pass the buck for justice to the players? Or should we call for the league to take firmer action, to enforce the rules of the game, and to protect players’ health and livelihoods? To me, the latter option is the obvious choice. Otherwise, we may as well throw out the rulebook, tell the refs to stand back, and let the bloodbath begin.

In conclusion, I take very serious issue with Mr. Kennedy’s casual acceptance of violence in hockey and his suggestion that players enforce the rules of the game by the warped standards of “the Code”. I also feel that The Hockey News should make a strong effort to present alternative visions to the damaging views espoused by Mr. Kennedy, and to seriously consider the consequences that would arise from an implementation of his ideal for the sport. I know Mr. Kennedy is but one voice amongst many in the hockey media – but I sincerely hope, for the good of the players and fans of the sport, that his views are in the minority.

Sincerely,

Mark Norman

[Phone number omitted]

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Does “The Code” still exist?

November 19, 2011 by 3 Comments

Photo from Don Landry

For those who have yet to see or hear about the Milan Lucic hit on Ryan Miller the synopsis is that Lucic was chasing the puck and Miller came out around the faceoff dot to play it.  After Miller cleared the puck to the side boards Lucic took the opportunity to level him.  Naturally a brewhaha insued and after the dust settled Brendan Shanahan said “looked okay to me, no suspension” (That’s not what he really said but the result is the same). This week in the Vancouver Sun, Dave Stubbs wrote an opinion piece titled “Lucic, Sabres both violated code”, to which I wondered – does The Code really still exist?

In Stubbs’ article he argues that Lucic violated the Thou shall not run the goalie commandment and the Sabres violated the Thou shall protect the goalie at all costs commandment.

Centre Paul Gaustad, at six-foot-five and 212 advertised pounds, was on the ice and barely blinked at Lucic when the Bruin ran over Miller…The Sabre’s alternate captain has been harshly self-critical of his own inaction, and of his team as a whole.

There are codes in hockey.  One was broken [Saturday] and honestly we broke one as well.  We didn’t protect our goaltender the way we should.

The Code is essentially an unwritten agreement of respect and honour amongst players.  Let’s play the game fair and square and let the best team win.  However, as has been mentioned in many other Hockey in Society posts, it also gives a pat on the back to vigilante justice.  An eye for an eye, as Gandhi said, makes the whole world blind and that is definitely what Shanahan (and the NHL at large) seems to have on – blinders.  Gaustad berates himself for not reacting with physical violence on his teammate’s behalf, but why should he have to? There are referees on the ice. There are rules in place. There is the great hand of justice in Shanahan. Why should any player have to take the justice into his own hands? Is it because a suspension isn’t enough punishment (if it happens)?  Is it because guys like Lucic will probably only get suspended for 1 out of every 4 dirty hits so we had better put him in his place if the league won’t do it?  Probably a combination of the both I would say, but I ask again – does The Code still exist?

And if this mythical Code does exist, is it the same one that people like Don Cherry espouse?  I have a feeling that it’s not the same Code anymore.  The game has changed, the players have changed and I suspect that so has The Code.  Perhaps what we are seeing is The Code 2.0, whereby flying elbows, headshots and goalie running is fair game.  It seems to me that players like Lucic (Subban, Marchand) fear nothing, they fear no retribution and it does not seem like there is really a way of putting fear into them either.  I think a lack of fear (interchangeable with respect) amongst young players signals a change in the governance of the game.  After all, once the Mafia no longer runs the neighbourhood anything goes right?  Just as North American youth largely seem to have forgotten the guideline of  “respect your elders”, it seems that same youth defiance has infiltrated the NHL.  It is often said that an indicator of civil unrest is the percentage of youth (generally under the age of 30) versus the percentage of non-youth and once the balance swings to the youngin’s favour it’s a crapshoot as to who will come out on top.  Societal norms evolve over time and given that sport is embedded within these social interactions it is a safe assumption to make (I think) that the rules of the game, written or otherwise, will have to adapt.

So despite the fact that Stubbs’ thinks both parties violated The Code in the Lucic/Miller incident, I would have to disagree and say that I think Lucic is merely trying to renegotiate the contact.

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Weekly Links: Frontier Justice in the NHL; Saftey vs. Risk in Hockey

November 18, 2011 by Leave a comment

Image from: http://nesn.com

Welcome to Hockey in Society’s Weekly Links post. This feature highlights articles or blog entries that are related to Hockey in Society’s areas of interest and that may be of interest to the site’s readers.

Hockey Links

  • Ryan Kennedy a bizarre plea for more frontier justice in the NHL. Read on for gems such as “[if] you can’t get at the perp, why not just beat the crap out of the guy nearest to you?” and “athletes often use war as a metaphor to pump themselves up for competition, so why shouldn’t they go all Sun-Tzu once in a while?” I am at a loss for words. [The Hockey News]
  • Fortunately THN employs some voices of reason to counter the buffoonery of articles such as that by Kennedy. Adam Proteau reports on the NHL General Managers’ Meetings, at which Milan Lucic’s hit that concussed Sabres goaltender Ryan Miller was a topic of discussion. Proteau’s critique of the efforts by GMs to address player safety: a little less conversation, a little more action. [The Hockey News]
  • Sometimes I think The Onion may be the most insightful news source out there. Lampooning tough-on-crime policies, hockey culture, and the NHL’s inability to safely police itself all in one article? Fantastic. [The Onion Sports Network; h/t to Hockey in Society reader Matt for the link]
  • Are today’s NHL players meaner? Ex NHLer Edgar Laprade, who played for the New York Rangers between 1945-1955, thinks so. [Globe and Mail]
  • The Vancouver Police Department issues a massive WANTED poster of 104 suspects from the June 15 riots. While the justice system works through the process of identifying and charging individuals, the court of public opinion has already condemned many people through social media. [Puck Daddy]
  • The NHL adds former player Stephane Quintal to its Department of Player Safety. [Kukla's Corner]
  • A couple of discussions about risk in sport, in reaction to the tragic death of Alberta teenager Kyle Fundytus from a puck that struck his neck. The balance between risk and injury is something that this blog will discuss more in the future. [Globe and Mail and Puck Daddy]

General Sport Links

  • Sepp Blatter, the President of FIFA, shocked the sports world by announcing that racism does not exist in soccer and that it can be settled by a handshake: “There is no racism [on the field], but maybe there is a word or gesture that is not correct. . . . The one affected by this should say this is a game and shake hands. [BBC Sport]
  • Blatter rightly got slammed by prominent sportpeople for his shocking comments… [The Independent]
  • … forcing the embattled President to issue an apology. Blatter also brushed off calls for him to resign, which have come from many quarters. [ESPN]

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