NHL players cannot rely on the league and rulebook alone to guarantee their safety.
TAMPA, FLA -- With the National Hockey League's general managers set to meet across state in Boca Raton next Monday, the Zdeno Chara hit just altered the agenda.
Max Pacioretty's plight dominated the hockey world Wednesday, so we'll get our unpopular opinion out of the way early.
Personally, I see Pacioretty as a player who poked the bear for three straight games, then was foolish enough to put himself in a position where the big Bruin could exact payback.
We're not saying the payback was legal. It wasn't -- the puck was nowhere near.
But we are saying that if you expect Chara to know that turnbuckle was there, then you have to grant that Pacioretty did too. He also knew Chara was after him, since Pacioretty had antagonized Chara off and on for most of three games.
The Habs forward rolled the dice and lost. He could have hit the brakes, he could have gone inside. He chose instead to attempt to squeeze past Chara down the boards, and it was a bad decision.
We know. He's hurt bad. But he wouldn't be hurt bad if he'd have taken his safety in his own hands.
It's a man's game. Sometimes you block a shot and it breaks your ankle. Sometimes you poke the bear and the bear catches up to you.
Of course, the fallout has also reached far wider than anyone would have known.
Air Canada, conveniently headquartered in Montreal, is threatening to pull league sponsorship dollars. Political opportunists -- who won't give money for new rinks, but will tell the NHL how to run its business -- are dragging the game into the House of Commons.
The league, predictably, lacked the savvy to see any of this coming, letting Chara walk rather than at least giving him two or three games. The inaction enraged the growing faction of "concerned" hockey observers, leaving them to further lament the violent, disturbing place that the NHL has become.
We have been here before, however, and history tells us that simply installing a new paragraph in the rule book and ratcheting up discipline czar Colin Campbell's responsibility has not only failed to solve the problem, but made it worse.
Go back with me to a time when hitting from behind was the concern of the day; when that STOP sign that is sewn today on the back of perhaps every minor hockey jersey in our country came into being.
In earlier days, any player who stood near the boards and turned his back to an oncoming checker was considered nothing short of an outright fool. I'll never forget the 1,000-game NHLer who told me, when you saw that, "It was an invitation to paste him in the numbers as hard as you could."
No one hoped that player would be injured -- or paralyzed -- by the hit that was sure to come, but the prevailing sentiment inside the game as he was peeled off of the end boards like a flattened-out cartoon character was, "He should protect himself better."
As a result, you rarely saw a player in that position.
Today's player relies on the referees and Campbell to defend him. The sight of a defenceman turning face-to-the-boards as a checking forward bears down on him is commonplace. Hard, dangerous hits from the backside, sending a player head-first into the dasher happens almost every night, it seems.
Ostensibly, the responsibility for player safety in that situation was taken from the players and given to the referee. It didn't work.
In Pacioretty's case, the smaller Canadiens forward had a running grudge going with Chara. He knew it was there, after opening the feud with an ill-advised shove after his overtime winner by Montreal on Jan. 8. Pacioretty never backed down from Chara, yapping and sparring with the giant Bruins d-man over the course of the next two games.
Now Pacioretty is coming down the wing. The score is 4-0 Montreal, with seconds left in Period 2.
He knows Chara wants to crank him. He can see the partition coming.
Pacioretty had every reason to believe he was entering a very dangerous spot, yet he went in there like a defenceman turning his back to the ice, counting on the rulebook to protect him.
If this sounds like a defence of Chara, it's not intended that way. He inflicted too much damage here.
I'm not sure, however, that you can read his mind and accuse Chara of knowing what he was doing. No more than we can say David Steckel intended to clobber Sidney Crosby, another blow the NHL deemed to be accidental.
The point is: who cares how long the suspension is when you are Pacioretty, with a broken vertebra and concussion? The rule book didn't shield him form harm at all.
