BOCA RATON, Fla. — When you are a vice president in a multi-billion dollar corporation, the question, “What is the dumbest thing you ever did?” isn’t supposed to be part of the interview. But Brendan Shanahan, the oft-suspended winger-turned-dispenser of National Hockey League justice, almost expects the question, and the carved up smile that query produces suggests a plea of no contest might be the easiest way out.
In the end, he’ll ‘fess up about that bad decision in Pittsburgh back in 1987. And then, only because it’s a pretty good laugh, he’ll tell you how his all-time stupidity moment ended up on a Christmas card. “The dumbest thing I ever got suspended for?” begins the NHL’s Vice President of Players Safety and Hockey Operations. “I tried climbing into the stands in Pittsburgh, from the penalty box. About 10 games into my NHL career. All I got was cut up fingers, a bump on the head from something that was thrown at me, and a lot of beer doused on me. And a one-game suspension.
“It ended up being a great Christmas card that the Pittsburgh Penguins mailed out. Me, Ken Daneyko and a few other guys trying to scale the glass with, like, rage in our eyes. You opened up the card and it said, ‘Peace on Earth, Goodwill Towards Men. Merry Christmas from the Pittsburgh Penguins.'”
What is the best part of that story? The awesome Christmas card, or the fact that scaling the glass back in 1987 was only a one-game suspension?
If you are going to hire Wayne Gretzky to help coach your hockey team, he should be in charge of the power play and all things offence. If you’re looking for someone to become the Director of Player Safety, you should find someone who crossed the line—a lot. Shanahan, who attended the NHL’s GM meetings in an advisory role from his corner of Hockey Operations, figures he was suspended “more than five times” in a Hall of Fame career that spanned 1,524 games from 1987-2009. Add in the fines, and we are “near double digits.” Likely into them.
Jurisprudence has changed much since then, and if Shanahan came across another Irish-Canadian kid from Mimico, Ont., who hit, fought, scored and punished opponents—both dirty and clean—the way he used to, he knows how he’d handle him. “I would be hard on me,” he says. “But as a player, once I believed the guy doing this job was on to me, that he wasn’t going to buy my B.S., I would adapt. As a disciplinarian I would have been all over me. As a player, I would have adapted.”
Yesterday’s player was never asked to adapt. Not so today. And although it is Shanahan who usually voices the video explanations that accompany suspensions now, and Shanahan who has become the face of the newly minted Department of Player Safety, he is quick to make two things plain: One, a number opinions are harvested in the suspension process (10 people help decide if a hearing is deserved, five once the hearing is underway). And two, if he weren’t cracking down on head shots under Rule 48, someone else surely would be.
“There just isn’t an appetite for it anymore,” he says. “If every guy in our department left to live on an island and open up a little burger shack on the beach, the next people coming in would still be eliminating dangerous head shots and making the game as safe as possible. This isn’t something I all of the sudden decided we would do.”
We watched over the past few GMs meetings as Rule 48—Illegal Check to the Head—was formulated. Then the hockey world looked on as Shanahan’s department implemented the change into a hockey population that does not always greet evolution with open arms. His (sorry, their) success is indisputable today, most notably by the fact that the most prominent perpetrators have openly accepted that their game must change. Raffi Torres is trying not to concuss people; Matt Cooke has been transformed; Colby Armstrong ceased to throw those hits, but injuries forced him from the game—just to name three.
“Mike Richards,” Shanahan says, adding another name to the list. “He could throw that David Booth-type hit once a game if he wanted to. Go look on YouTube at how he used to back check and come across the middle. Do I think he still has the timing, the physicality to do that? Yes. He’s just not doing it anymore.”
Does a discipline department fronted by a player like Shanahan make the message easier to deliver? Outwardly, one would think not. But hockey culture is insular, and credibility means everything. “He was a very good leader, very well respected, and a decisive guy on the ice,” says Edmonton Oilers GM Craig MacTavish, whose career overlapped with Shanahan’s by a decade. “He might be the perfect guy who carries the credibility of the players and to come from that subset (of physical, all-around players), yet work at the league for a while.
“He’s not going to err on the side of eliminating the checking and the toughness. But he’s going to eliminate the stupidity.”
Asked if he has had to suspend many friends and former teammates, he has to search for a name. “I was old,” Shanahan says. I played until I was 40. Most of my friends were in management and coaching.” He thinks for a moment. “David Clarkson (suspended twice this season) grew up in my neighborhood, and was a teammate of mine at the end of my career.”
Really though, that is irrelevant. Today’s player pulls on a new uniform and changes allegiance at the drop of the puck. It is the same with today’s player-turned-NHL executive. “When I was a player I think everybody knew that, if tomorrow night we were playing in an Olympics, and you’re not my teammate anymore, and I have to got through you to get a win, you know I’m going to do my job,” he said. “It’s the same here.”
Just without the Christmas cards.