Jim Kelley

Jim Kelley writes regularly on the NHL for Sportsnet.ca and can be heard on Primetime Sports on the FAN590.

Seinfeld fans must think Gary Bettman pulled a 'big salad' for taking credit on the head shot rule.

Whenever I’m reminded –mostly from the readers of this space, the people I do indeed hold dear—that I might be a tad too cynical, I think of the quote from humourist Lilly Tomlin: "No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up."

Exhibit A: NHL commissioner Gary Bettman taking a bow for the resolution of the spat between the league and the NHL Players’ Association regarding the "safety issue" of blows to the head.

"We believe this is the right thing to do for the game and for the safety of our players," the commissioner said after receiving unanimous approval from the NHL’s board of governors as well as the endorsement of the competition committee and the NHLPA executive board. "The elimination of these types of hits should significantly reduce the number of injuries, including concussions, without adversely affecting the level of physicality in the game."

You always know the bulk of the infighting is over and the agreement is firmly in hand whenever the commissioner issues a statement. Attendance is always up. Television ratings, always a work in progress, have made progressive strides. Reports that the Phoenix Coyotes are being supported by the National Hockey League are fiction and are made up by reporters.

OK, except for that last one you get the point.

The commissioner tends to leave the dirty work to the underlings –namely deputy commissioner Bill Daly—until things are pretty much decided. A cynic might argue that it’s been near impossible to keep up with the spinning of events from last week until today, when there was some sort of compromise reached on the head shot issue, but I’ll take a different tact:

The newly arranged agreement between the league and the PA still has a host of problems ahead of it and should make for a difficult summer for the two sides, but beginning Thursday and for the remainder of the season and the playoffs, there will be a way to use the power of rules to rein in blows to the head. They can certainly be used to clamp down on hits from the cone of catastrophe, the blind side, lateral side and "back pressure" side that the GMs identified just two weeks ago, and maybe even the full frontal attacks like the hit James Wisniewski laid on Brent Seabrook last week.

In truth, even before the commissioner came out with his statement, league disciplinarian Colin Campbell had a "eureka!" moment and determined that Wisniewski’s hit was "a blow to the head with intent to injure" and worthy of an eight-game suspension resulting in $200,000-plus fine.

One could, especially if one is a member of the NHLPA, argue that that is part of the problem, hence several days of sparring between the two long-term adversaries about the rule, what it is, who has a say in it and, most importantly from the PA’s point of view, why it shouldn’t be left up to Campbell.

This has played out via a series of charges and counter charges and both sides made interesting points. As of now the NHL and commissioner Bettman, largely through the work of Daly, have gained some of the high ground. Under the new agreement, there will be no on-ice rule regarding blows to the head, but Campbell will be able to review and suspend in accordance with a level of comfort both sides seemingly can live with until the end of the playoffs.

The PA, however, has a victory in hand as well. It gets an opportunity to review the rule (as the current collective bargaining agreement seems to say is their right) with an eye toward tweaking the on-ice component (for instance what constitutes a major or minor violation), as well as how far Campbell can go in compiling the number of games and, subsequently, the amount of the eventual fine.

That’s fair, especially in light of the fact that the league has sometimes called blows to the head a non-infraction because there was no specific rule, to the times when it handed out substantial supplemental discipline to the tune of 15, 20 and 25 games.

A rule, with teeth, backed by a hard and fast number of games for certain kinds of infractions is tough to come up with, but it’s not impossible and besides, it would appear under the CBA that it does have to be collectively bargained.

Cite the players for perhaps looking out for the bottom line over safety as my colleague on this site, Mark Spector, did earlier this week, but it’s also fair that the players who are truly caring are not just concerned with money, but also want a rule that protects their well-being and takes it out of the hands of arbitrary Campbell rulings and puts it at a point where players know exactly what the consequences of their actions are.

That’s especially important if you subscribe to the theory that it’s not just the players who can’t control themselves, but that there are coaches and maybe even general managers who employ certain players to deliver those kinds of hits and even urge them to do it.

In their reluctant rush to judgment, the GMs at the very least gave the impression that they were willing to protect those coaches and GMs. Sure they issued a rule, but it was a vague one that largely left the issue to Campbell, whose rulings have, shall we say, not been completely consistent.

Say what you will about player motivation and call me a cynic if you like, but one can easily argue that players haven’t exactly been well served regarding their safety on the ice when the matter has been left solely to the discretion of the commissioner and those in his employ. Just ask Pat LaFontaine, Eric Lindros or even Chris Drury who took a legendary cheap shot from Ottawa’s Chris Neil a few years back and was concussed for weeks. No penalty on the play, but now it’s on the DVD for what constitutes an illegal hit.

And now to a few other items:

Several of you wrote that I shouldn’t have used Scott Stevens’ various hits to the heads of Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya and Ron Francis as examples of wayward hits of bygone times, but I’ll take this to my grave: those hits were planned and they were planned to have Stevens (who by the way has paid a head injury price of his own for those collisions) seek and destroy a member of the opposition.

Go back and look at the tapes and for that matter, look at the DVD the league has put out regarding some of what they now say are illegal hits. In several of those Stevens hits you can detect a well thought out plan, a play where an opposing puck carrier is forced into a trap, usually in the neutral zone just before the blue line he is attacking. In the Stevens example, Lindros is pressured from two points of a triangle and while looking at the player directly in front of him, he is nailed from the side by a hard-charging Stevens who comes from a good distance away. Illegal? Not as long as Stevens kept his shoulder tight and his elbow down, which he almost always did, but it was delivered by design and with an intent to take the player out, no question about it.

More subtle than Tie Domi on Scott Niedermayer in the 2001 playoffs, but every bit as devastating. Why this is still a clean hit is impossible to explain and surely one of the issues the PA would want to address.

One or two of you argued against my saying that Wisniewski’s hit on Seabrook was the kind the GMs left in the game and that it was not an elbow. Upon further review, the Anaheim player does seem to rake Seabrook with an elbow after the initial hit, but there was no elbowing call on the play, only charging. It goes to show that even the two referee system is paralyzed when it comes to determining exactly what the NHL wants here. Sure it was charging, but it was so much more and both the men in stripes apparently didn’t feel it warranted an elbowing call. Not a good thing.

As always, your comments are welcome.