Thursday Morning Cupcheck

by Todd Maternowski

Our second installment of no-holds-barred hockey reportage.

In last week's Thursday Morning Cupcheck, we laughed, we loved, we learned -- and we established my hockey reporting credentials. At the end of the column I said I would be discussing the new, purposefully noisy fans at the AAC, and delve into the pure genius of the idea (my only complaint: why'd it take this long to bring in arena-rocking fans?). Alas, my hero, Stars broadcaster and well-known Pope of Hockey Daryl Reaugh beat me to the punch. And speaking of beating and punching...

After what happened in the Stars' game against Nashville, it should be pretty obvious to even the most casual observer of the sport that the NHL needs to bring the hammer down --on itself. Primarily for being a bunch of chodes who've driven hockey's ratings somewhere between Competitive Grandpa Tossing and Sun-Staring Contests, but also for their insane quest to rid the sport of fighting.

Somebody better punch this guy

To the true hockey fan --or random passerby who'd never even heard of hockey -- fighting is the #1 draw for the sport, far more than goals, no-look passes and hairy Canadian men. This is because, unlike the act of taking a stick, skating on a frozen pond and hitting a small black object into an upright arrangement of twine, fighting is something most people will actually experience once or twice during the course their entire lives. Fighting is ingrained in our violent, low-forehead culture, as much a part of our collective DNA as hunting and foraging, an integral building-block for our nation's roadhouses, cheerleader camps and nunneries. And judging from recent far-seeing documentaries Futurama and Starship Troopers, contact sports in the future will be even more violent: already ESPN8 ("The Ocho") has plans to air Grade-School Chainsaw Dueling and re-runs of the ever-popular Shark Mouth versus Human Fist.

More importantly, it's a big draw for the sport of hockey. Speaking from experience, I've often left the room to get a sandwich just seconds before a Sidney Crosby no-look behind-the-back granny-sticking game-winning goal: but I have never left the room when two Nordic ogres are about to square off and go all Baryshnikov in the brutal brain-bash ballet. Even if most hockey fights are little more than jersey-tugging stare-fests, there is something instinctively magnetic about gladiatorial combat. This is no doubt because we can all picture ourselves in their skates: who among us hasn't seen a 6'3", 240-pound mass of hairy, brutish humanity wielding a long wooden weapon --and felt like clocking him in the face? Fess 'up, America.

Perhaps even more critical is fighting's role in policing the game. Outside of the league office, no one in their right minds should have been surprised when the number of cheap shots and intentional injuries went up as fighting went down. Fighting was a way for testosterone-jacked men carrying deadly weapons to constructively work off a little steam. Not only that, but the stratospheric scoring totals of the 1980s and early 1990s would not have been possible without the copious amount of fighting that occurred in those times: every team had at least one or two goons ready to defend their wispy goal-scoring brethren from cheap-shot artists on other teams, and the ensuing detente resulted in nightly score sheets approaching WBNA totals.

I can hear the league office's shrill whine now: But isn't that what our referees are there for? We don't want the players to police the game. Also, we've replaced our brains with molten lead, eat pickled moose diarrhea and our arms are getting tired from punching all these kittens in the face. Valid points, indeed, unless you live in the real world and experience real life. Truth is, competent NHL officials aren't present at every game. Sure there are a few: Koharski, Fraser, McGeough are known far and wide as fair-minded gents that effectively manage a game. But the majority, it seems, are trolls more willing to put their own stamp on each game than actually allow the amazingly skilled players to, uh, play. Where did they get these guys, St. Agnes School for the Blind? (I'm kidding, of course... most NHL refs never went to school). To anyone watching the games, it appears officials are increasingly trying to take over games with phantom calls and trendy penalties. This is undoubtedly mandated by the league office, who once saw a movie where dwarves whistled while they worked, and thought, "Hey! We're the league office! We could hire a bunch of little men and make them whistle non-stop! Our pathetic little insect-lives are now complete!"

To translate into football terminology, what transpires is a game with continuous pass interference and offensive holding calls, with the occasional false start to spice things up a bit. In other words, exactly what every fan wants. To make matters worse, 98% of the calls usually result when one player looks at another player in a discouraging or demeaning way, or perhaps breaths heavily on said opponent, resulting in a barrage of "hooking" and "interference" penalties. Again for the hockey-impaired NFL fan, calling "hooking" and "interference" is like calling "tackling" and "blocking" fouls in football.

This would be fine if the referees actually called real fouls, but they simply don't. The result? Plenty of frustration, both for the players who are getting illegal sticks to their lower back, and to the fans, who have to watch this crap. This should be where fighting comes to the rescue, right? Wrong: anyone caught starting a fight gets an additional "instigator" penalty. This is the league's way of trying to crack down on fighting. This also means that if a talentless goon goes out of his way to run your top goal-scorer face-first into the boards, anyone of your teammates who rushes to defend said goal scorer against said thug will get an instigator penalty, i.e., the league is awarding mouth-breathing bottomfeeders when they intentionally injure star players. Again, what every fan wants!

Nowhere was this chain of events more obvious than in this past week's Stars games. Going back to the Philly game, the Stars' tiny young forward Chris Connor was illegally run by a much larger Flyer after Connor had gotten rid of the puck. The cheating Flyer, Denis Gauthier (already known around the league as a cowardly cheap shot artist) injured Connor (who is still injured a week later), and received no penalty. When the Stars' Krys Barch rushed to defend his fallen comrade, he was hit with an instigator penalty as well as a game misconduct. Justice was clearly not dispensed (although Barch did get a couple of great punches to Gauthier's fat face).

A similar incident almost happened in Calgary two nights later, when, in a game with 13 called fouls and only 2-3 real ones, the refs had succeeded in whistling the game into submission. There were at least 9 penalties that absolutely had no right being called, other than the referee for the game, who will not be named here, wanted to discipline anyone with testosterone levels higher than a 12-year old Celine Dion fan. Meanwhile, tons of actual rough-stuff was not being called, and tempers were approaching the boiling point, but no one wanted to take a fighting instigator penalty to cool things off a bit. The result? A harmless, but bone-headed play by the Stars' Niklas Hagman following Lehtinen's empty net goal nearly resulted in a rink-wide kerfuffle.

This pattern of incompetent refereeing came to a head in Nashville, where Modano became the all-time leading U.S.-born scorer to a chorus of boos, following an extremely ugly incident involving a cheap shot, a sucker punch, a concussion --and a penalty assessed to an unconscious player. Could the league have marketed this record-breaking event better?

We all know what the league needs to beat Over-70 Women's Poker in the ratings: they need to bring back fighting. The Stars are certainly doing their part, among the top-five teams in the league in fighting majors, and can't be blamed for the NHL's overall incompetence (on a side note, the team that leads the league in fighting majors, the Anaheim Whiny Ducks, continues to do a massive disservice to the sport of hockey by cheapening the fighting major, watering it down to the point of boredom). No doubt Gary Bettman and his yes-men are threatened by public displays of masculinity, and dream of an NHL in which whisper-thin fe-men prance around in tights and doilies, reciting poetry they wrote in fifth grade and writing about their feelings in unicorn-emblazoned journals. Fortunately, for frustrated fans of fisticuffs, there's always NASCAR and the NBA.