Bertuzzi, the Instigator Rule, and P.R.
Even if you’re not a hockey fan, you’ve probably seen a clip of the incident Monday night in Vancouver. In the third period of what ended as a 9-2 Colorado Avalanche blowout, Todd Bertuzzi of the Canucks sucker-punched the Avs’ Steven Moore from behind, then jumped on him, driving his head into the ice. Moore suffered several broken vertebrae, a concussion and deep facial cuts as a result of Bertuzzi’s mugging, which was in retaliation for a clean but brutal hit by Moore on Canucks captain Markus Naslund in February.
Bertuzzi was suspended today by the NHL for the duration of the 2003-04 season and playoffs, which seems appropriate to me. But the NHL is between a rock and a hard place regarding a solution to the larger problem of premeditated, retaliatory violence getting out of hand.
Multiple commentators have suggested (see sidebar — link hat tip to Eric McErlain) that the instigator penalty is to blame for incidents like this. For those unfamiliar with it, the instigator rule ensures that a player who comes on the ice specifically to start a fight gets an extra two-minute minor penalty (which takes a skater away from his team) and ten-minute misconduct (which does not), in addition to the coincidental five-minute majors for both participants. End result: two-minute power play for the “victimized” team, and a fifteen-minute cooling-off spell for the instigator.
So the instigator rule discourages immediate retaliation, which sounds good. The problem is that teams don’t forget about the initial slight, which lets the anger build over time — and that usually makes the inevitable retaliation worse. In the old pre-instigator, self-policing hockey world, Bertuzzi or Canucks teammate Brad May would have had a straight-up fight with Moore on his next shift, and thus closed the book on the Naslund hit within 15 minutes. Instead we got this, and the usual suspects are again decrying the brutality of hockey based on their nightly ration of the first 10 minutes of SportsCenter. But the obvious solution looks, to the uninitiated, like it encourages more fighting, and thus is a no-no to the public relations-conscious NHL office. It’s a bad fix for Gary Bettman and the NHL’s disciplinary “vice-principal” of sorts, Colin Campbell — and for hockey fans like me, who have to defend our sport yet again.
11 March 2004 / 0 Comments / Tags: hockey, media