Two years after Don Sanderson died from complications resulting from a hockey scrap, the fighting debate has returned. Not because another player was killed trying to stand up for himself, a teammate, or to simply change the momentum of the game, but rather the unfathomable off-season passing of three men who fought in the NHL last winter.
Sportsnet has not shied away from the role violence plays in hockey, broadcasting the Crisis on Ice, much to the chagrin of some at the NHL and several team front office members.
A big part of that hour focused on concussions. This summer the stakes were raised.
I am not going to say Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien and Wade Belak would be alive today if they had been part of the general workforce. Nobody knows the role, if any, hockey fights played in their deaths.
“We don’t know how much it had to do with anything until the findings come out,” Doug MacLean said on a Hockeycentral @ Noon broadcast. “But doesn’t it make it frightening when you see what happened to these three guys? It’s gotta be looked at big time.”
So we had the conversation. Hockeycentral invited Hall of Famer Denis Potvin to join panel mainstays MacLean, Nick Kypreos and Brad May.
The challenge wasn’t to get rid of fighting, but instead, what can be done about it’s presence in the NHL – addressing the future of two players dropping their gloves, trading punches and spending five minutes in the penalty box before being free to do it again.
Four men with a combined six Stanley Cup titles, a world junior championship and Calder Cup, to go along with the experience of coaching in a Stanley Cup final before assembling a franchise from scratch produced the most honest conversation I have heard on the subject, on the air or off.
The desire to maintain the present rules that punish fighting was unanimous; how to accomplish that was not.
Potvin captained his club to 5 consecutive Stanley Cup Finals; he was mean when he wasn’t dirty.
“Reduce the roster to 17 or 18 players; make it 11 forwards, five or six defencemen,” Potvin said. “Every coach in the league would be thrilled he doesn’t have to play a fourth line to get him in there for three minutes. Everybody paying the bills would be happy.
“You’ve got a guy who makes $600,000 a year, which admittedly is about the range where a lot of these tough guys make money, playing three minutes, that’s over $1,000 dollars a minute. If you’re playing an average ice time of 15 minutes a game, you’d have to be a $5 million player to get that much.”
MacLean went along.
“The only way to get rid of the trained fighter is to take roster spots,” he said. “I guarantee you the PA and the NHL will never agree on reducing roster spots as much as the coaches would like it, and I agree with that.”
Potvin admits his idea is a long shot. As for eliminating the token “tough guy,” he believes teams would not employ a fight specialist if there were two fewer spots.
“I want to make every roster spot even more valuable,” he said.
Kypreos and May both arrive at work wearing shiny reminders of Stanley Cup championships on their right hand.
Neither will try to sell you that they were Conn Smythe candidates, so it’s not shocking the pair with a combined penalty minute total of 3,458 came at this from the other side of the rink, or in hockey geography, the penalty box.
“I think Denis’ suggestion is appropriate,” said May. “But I gotta tell ya: you can’t have a rose without the thorns, and nobody wants to watch a game of hockey in the middle of November maybe even in January that’s going to have no hits and no passion, and no fire works. And it will be and that’s the league that you guys are proposing.”
Kypreos went further: “82 regular season games for some of these guys, going to a Stanley Cup final – you’re well over 100 games,” he said. “I just think, as minimal as that extra body would be it’s still taxing the players, it’s still now asking to get more out of them.”
MacLean coached in four NHL organizations and has a son who is a senior playing in NCAA Division I.
“I am not suggesting taking fighting out of the (NHL) game, but I would be thrilled to see the guy who plays two minutes, who’s the trained fighter, who’s only job is to have a staged fight once a game; if you lose him you’re not losing anything,” he said. Reminded that two of the players who passed away this summer qualified for that trained fighter roll, MacLean answered: “I don’t know if the deaths had anything to do with fighting; I am not a doctor, we don’t know if it had anything to do with it. I hope not.”
Amazingly May played his role and never dealt with concussion problems – he is as friendly and welcoming as any professional athlete you could meet.
Bring up the insinuation the game is at fault for his colleagues deaths and you see the intensity that helped keep him in the NHL for almost two decades.
“We lost three great people in the game of hockey this summer from different reasons,” said May. “They have survivors so you have to respect them, but fighting had nothing to do with it.
“The job and the pressures – I understand it has nothing to do with it. Every person listening today, all of us, we all have pressure. It’s all a matter of perspective. The question is has the NHL and has professional sports done enough to raise awareness and teach these players and these people that when you do have pressure and do have problems that there has to be place to go to and vent and it’s not an insecurity. You’ve gotta be taken care of.”
May has shared stories about his fights, including an incredibly nervous week leading up to an encounter with Derek Boogaard in the fall of 2007.
Knowing he would have to fight the 6-foot-7 member of the Wild as an answer to belting Kim Johnsson the previous spring was admittedly one of the most uncomfortable moments of his career. Yet his opinion of the role doesn’t change.
“If you want less head shots and you want less people injured, you have to allow more fighting and there will be less injuries,” he said.
For Kypreos, few subjects bring out as much passion as the accusation hockey is too violent.
“Honestly, I really believe that we gotta to stop apologizing for fighting,” he said. “It’s almost as if that we have it, we like it, but we’re supposed to not like it because we have evolved as a society. I’m sitting here going: it’s the opposite.”
Kypreos has been on the air at Sportsnet for 13 years and hasn’t wavered.
“I think either you’re in or you’re out,” he said. “That’s it.”
May is firmly in his corner: “The ability to take care of the situation on the ice, I think the fights keep the game safer and I think it will make these little rats that play the game more accountable.”
MacLean and Kypreos are very good friends. Their relationship dates back to MacLean coaching his equally outspoken panelist in the American Hockey League.
Like then, they disagree on certain points.
“I still think there is room in the game for the emotional fights; when two guys are battling and they are ticked off at each other,” MacLean offers. “What I am not for is the one guy on each team, the staged fight. What we typically see is the heavyweight fight the heavyweight and I don’t know how that helps.”
So all of these experienced experts would keep fighting, but are split about the inclusion of the specialist. What about the future of the scrap?
Will the NHL deal with fighting in a way that ejects players by the end of this decade? Can the league possibly match the way it is rapidly adjusting its position on hits to the head?
“There is a difference between a body check and blatant blows to the head,” MacLean said. “When you are getting blatant blows to the head by 6-foot-8 guys, I think fighting will probably be out of the game; I don’t want it to be.”
It will take more to convince Kypreos: “I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
“You know what I find absolutely amazing is I watch and hear about MMA become the fastest growing sport on the planet, and I’m sitting there going: we’re knocking our game because you might see a fight or two, and everybody’s up in arms over it.
“And you watch MMA today and you watch the constant bone-on-bone blows to the head and nobody’s saying boo about that,” Kypreos continued. “In our world, the way the game is played historically, (fighting) it is part of the game.”
Although May and Potvin tend to agree, they also admit change is inevitable.
“Absolutely it is, and I don’t want it to be,” May said. “I think it will be (out). The players that fight in the NHL sign up. When they lace up their skates they realize there is an inherent risk that night. The only people that are worried about fighting in the game of hockey, respectfully, are mothers and fathers. There is an assumption of risk; these players know what’s at stake.”
Family is a word at the centre of this debate. Fighters are considered a brotherhood, juxtaposed now by three families without sons, brothers, and a father.
Potvin believes the game has to be played, at times, across the line. Yet he thinks the days of five minutes for fighting and being allowed to remain in the game are nearing an end.
In a calm deliberate tone that wards off attempts by the ever-talkative panel to interrupt, Potvin offers perhaps the most logical solution: “I think that drug testing is going to be necessary during the season, not so much because of the uppers and all that.
“I question whether or not every team doctor knows the medication every player is on when he prescribes another pain killer, and I think that’s crucial and may have led to the depression of the three fellas that lost their lives.”
The levels of depression in Rypien, Boogaard and Belak are not certain.
The impact of their loss goes considerably deeper.
They loved playing the game their way, but is it time to think differently?