| 19 March 2010
James Wiesniewski got fucked over. Now, that fact is not inherently remarkable. The NHL's spastic "system" of supplemental discipline often yields bizarre results. But Wiesniewski's 8-game suspension is just the capper on a couple of weeks wherein the league is rushing to enact a shittily written "head shot" rule, as well as explicitly articulating the effect that a player's injury has on supplemental discipline (or doesn't have, if you are Matt Cooke; no one asserts that the NHL is even internally consistent).
Consider Wiesniewski. He sees Brent Seabrook make a questionable hit on star forward Corey Perry (He hit him in the head! Against the boards!). At his earliest opportunity (a few seconds later), he lines up Seabrook and blasts him into the boards (from the front, not behind). In doing so, he left his feet, and was appropriately penalized for charging (you could argue that he deserved a major, and I wouldn't disagree). Twenty years ago, this would have been a "story" for about 5 minutes.
But in the "modern" NHL, a role player standing up for a star that he felt was taken advantage of gets an 8-game suspension and a quarter-million-dollar fine (in the form of lost pay). Drunk drivers get punished less severely.
Here's the part where I go all slobbery in rage:
I don't fucking care that Seabrook got hurt. This is a man's game; large people are moving very quickly on an unstable surface. Many of them are trying to, if not injure you, at least cause you to feel intense pain. PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GET HURT, just in the normal course of events. Is it regrettable? Sure, in the sense that "wouldn't it be nice if it didn't happen." But in the sense of "we never want any player to get injured as a result of contact, ever," well, to paraphrase the inimitable Dan Hawkins, THIS IS PROFESSIONAL HOCKEY! IT'S THE NHL! Go play in a no-check rec league, brother.
And spare me the bullshit about "retaliation." It ain't money: retaliation, and the threat of it, is what makes the world go round. Why does Israel give the old fuck-you to Joe Biden? Because they know that the Obama administration isn't going to do diddle-shit about it. Why do I give in and buy my 3-year-old a donut at the grocery store? Because she will make my life living hell if I don't. Why were those asshole Tea Partiers mocking an old guy with Parkinson's? Because they were pretty damn sure he wasn't going to get up off the ground and beat their asses. (If that gentleman had been, say, a retired Teamster accompanied by a dozen or so of his bretheren, I don't think TeaBag McDickless would have been quite so in-your-face. Just a guess.) Retaliation is good. Mutually Assured Destruction kept the world (relatively) safe for 40+ years; now we've got nutjobs running around trying to get WMDs who don't fucking care whether they die, or their families die, or the world ends. That's a lot fucking scarier than the Russians.
The NHL has replaced a system that worked very well--you take liberties with one of mine, be prepared to pay the price--and replaced it with the worst of all possible worlds, a truly Draconian system. The evil (or genius, I suppose, depending on your perspective) of a Draconian system is not just that it's severe, it's that it is unpredictable, arbitrary. No one knows what is going to be punished, and for how long. Throw in the requisite half-assed refereeing, and the fact that a mushmelon like Colin Campbell is in charge of the whole thing, and you get what we have--a system that leads to a normal guy making a normal hockey play losing 8 games, while a goon running over an unsuspecting guy gets nothing.
I love the game of hockey. But the NHL disgusts me.
