Tagged: John Scott
On Dave Semenko, and the Past, Present, and Future of Fighting in Hockey
Edmonton Oilers great Dave Semenko passed away last week after a battle with pancreatic and liver cancer. Semenko was not the best player of his era, but he was one of the most memorable. He was the enforcer for the legendary Oilers teams of the 1980s, a team that was before my time but lives on forever on YouTube. He was Wayne Gretzky’s bodyguard on the ice, giving The Great One the security he needed to put up offensive numbers that are unfathomable 30 years later. He was such a star as an enforcer, he even had the opportunity to get in the ring and fight Muhammad Ali for charity.
Perhaps the most touching tribute to Semenko came from Gretzky himself at Semenko’s funeral. Wayne got it. He was maybe the most supremely skilled player ever to lace up skates, but the way he talks about his former teammate and dear friend shows that hockey, even at its highest level, is a blue collar sport where the tough guys are just as appreciated as the high-end finesse players. That Oilers team was loaded, and Semenko was their heart and soul.
There was a time when every team had a guy like Dave Semenko on their roster. Fighting was just part of the game, and as hard as it sometimes was to defend the tradition of fighting in hockey to non-hockey fans, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the importance of fighting in the game.
I believe that if hockey had been invented as a new sport in the 2010s, and the leaders of this upstart National Hockey League trying to make their new game as appealing and sustainable as possible, fighting would never in a million years make the cut. That being said, to keep going with this thought experiment, hockey as we know it would have a much better chance of being invented in 2017 than football as we know it. The pace of play and high floor of acceptable skill required for entry into the NHL plays in hockey’s favor.
As long as there has been hockey there have also been great players who were also good to great fighters from Eddie Shore to Maurice Richard to Gordie Howe to Bobby Orr to Larry Robinson to Mark Messier to Scott Stevens to Cam Neely to Jarome Iginla to to mike Richards to Zdeno Chara. Even guys like Semenko or Terry O’Reilly or Shawn Thornton could probably get minutes in a post-fighting NHL. They would not be stars, and their careers would not have been as long, but in their primes, they could play well enough to make the cut even if they could not or did not fight. The players who lose out in the modern NHL are the guys who can only fight, the John Scotts of the world, or late career Shawn Thornton and George Parros.
According to Hockeyfights.com, a great website I do not check nearly as often as I used to for some reason, there were 372 total fights in 2016-17, which is up from 344 the previous season, but probably not enough to reverse the downward trend of fighting in the NHL. There were 734 in 2008-09, the highest since the 2004-05 lockout, but since the 2012-13 lockout, no season has cracked 500 fights, and the 347 fights in the abbreviated 2013 season feels like something from a different era.
Those are just numbers on a chart, but a clearer illustration came in the 2014 Stanley Cup Playoffs. My Boston Bruins won the President’s Trophy that season, but had their hands full with their most hated rival, the Montreal Canadiens in the second round. Ultimately, the Bruins fell to the Habs in seven games. Montreal was the faster, more skilled team, while Boston prided itself on strength and toughness. That’s the rivalry in a nutshell. One key difference in the two teams was the use of the enforcer. Boston had Shawn Thornton, and Montreal had George Parros. The two were friends, and won the Stanley Cup together as members of the Anaheim Ducks in 2007. While Parros spent the playoffs in the press box, scratched from the lineup, the Bruins played Thornton. That philosophical difference was not on its own what put the Habs ahead of the Bruins that season, but it showed how much the game had changed.
In 2011, inserting Thornton into the lineup in the Cup Final against the Vancouver Canucks after Nathan Horton got hurt gave the Bruins an edge. They pushed the Canucks around after that, and won their first Stanley Cup since 1972. Thornton alone did not put them over the top, but his presence could not be discounted. Three years later, he was a liability in the playoffs for the Bruins.
The decline of the enforcer has been talked about for years. Before Dave Semenko’s passing, it was John Scott’s inclusion in the All-Star Game that caused a mass-reflection on the legacy of the role in hockey. Before that it was the deaths of Derek Boogaard, Wade Belak, Bob Probert, and others. Every time, the same sentiments are expressed: fighting in hockey is hard to defend to non-hockey fans, and the role of fighting means less now than it did even five years ago, but nonetheless, without it, the game is missing something, and the guys who do that dirty work are some of the most appreciated in the dressing room as well as with the most hardcore of hockey fans.
If there were ever an opening for fighting to gain a more prominent role in the NHL again, we may have it with the addition of the Vegas Golden Knights to the league. With a 31st team, there are now more NHL playing jobs than ever before, and the talent pool is even further diluted. Teams may place a greater emphasis on protecting their most skilled players, and there may be more roster spots available for guys who can fight better than they can score. Then again, if the next couple years do not bring fighting back to where it was as recently as 2013, it might be gone for good in 20 years.
The Depressing End to a Great Era in Bruins Hockey
The summer of 2011 feels like a million years ago. I was newly 21, I was still working at my beloved summer camp job in New Hampshire, and my Boston Bruins were on top of the hockey world for the first time since 1972. That fall, the Red Sox choked away a chance at the playoffs and got Terry Francona, the best manager in franchise history fired over their lack of performance, effectively ending the most successful era in Red Sox baseball since the Wilson Administration. My baseball team was falling apart while it looked like my hockey team was on the verge of becoming a dynasty. Five years later, the Bruins are in the situation the Red Sox were in 2011, with no clear path forward. The triumphant return of the Big Bad Bruins lasted a few years, but was gone before we knew it. How did we get here? And how do we get out?
This time a year ago, when the Bruins missed the playoffs for the first time since 2007, I thought general manager Peter Chiarelli and head coach Claude Julien had to go. Chiarelli did lose his job, and is now running the Edmonton Oilers, but Claude was left in limbo while Bruins president Cam Neely took his sweet time in an exhaustive search for a new GM which eventually led him to his friend, former teammate, and longtime Bruins assistant general manager Don Sweeney, and let Sweeney make the decision on Julien’s future in Boston. Sweeney decided to stick with Julien, but he was constantly on the hot seat this season, and it felt like he needed to make the playoffs to keep his job. There were highs and there were lows, but in the end, the 2016 Bruins found themselves in the same place their 2015 version was…out of the playoffs at the hands of teams that just wanted it more (last year, it was the Ottawa Senators, this year, it was the Detroit Red Wings who still have not missed the playoffs in my lifetime). While I feel Claude Julien is not the right coach for the Bruins anymore, everything has a shelf life, and no coach has been in their current job longer than Claude, it is impossible and irresponsible to place all the blame for the Bruins last two disappointing seasons on him. The problem is I’m not sure the Bruins know how to fix the mess they’ve put themselves in.
If you’ve read this blog religiously or you’ve talked to me in person about pop culture at any point in the last five years, you probably know about my affection for the HBO series The Wire, as I find ways to shoehorn it into the conversation almost as much as Community, Star Wars, or well, the Boston Bruins. One of the big picture ideas to take away from David Simon’s masterpiece about Baltimore’s failing institutions in the midst of the War on Drugs is that there is no simple solution. There is no one person to blame. It’s easy to throw it all on Mayor Carcetti (whose existence as a character gave real Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley no chance of making it past Iowa in this presidential election cycle), or Claude Julien, but you’re not looking at the whole picture if that’s what you do.
Claude Julien was the coach that oversaw back to back collapses in the final month of the season, and he’s responsible for motivating the team, but he wasn’t the one who put the roster together. He has relied too heavily on veteran players and prioritized guys like Chris Kelly (when healthy) or Brett Connolly or Kevan Miller over the development of young promising talent like David Pastrnak or Frank Vatrano or Colin Miller, but he was also coaching this season for his job and the immediate success veterans give you in the short term could buy him time more easily than waiting for a return on the investment of youth that may not come until he’s coaching elsewhere. He might not have wanted him on the team, but he didn’t trade Tyler Seguin to Dallas for pennies on the dollar (that was Chiarelli). He didn’t use a 1st round draft pick on a goaltender, Malcolm Subban, when Tuukka Rask was under contract and just entering his prime (that was Chiarelli). He might have given Chris Kelly too much ice time, but he wasn’t the one who signed a third liner to a stupid extension with a no movement clause (that was Chiarelli). He didn’t mismanage the salary cap to the point where the Bruins had to let Jarome Iginla walk in free agency but didn’t sign anyone to replace him on the top line, or trade a top four defenseman in the form of Johnny Boychuk to the Islanders for future draft picks (those were both Chiarelli). He didn’t trade Dougie Hamilton to the Flames for draft picks, leaving captain Zdeno Chara having to shoulder the load of an elite defenseman with little help at the age of 39 (that was Sweeney). He didn’t have three consecutive picks in the 1st round of the 2015 NHL Draft and not take a single player who could contribute to the NHL club in the 2015-16 season (that was Sweeney). He didn’t trade a 3rd round pick for Zac Freaking Rinaldo (that was Sweeney). Claude Julien is not perfect, but he’s a very good coach who is the Bruins’ all time wins leader (passing original coach and GM Art Ross last month), who changed his system on the fly this year in an attempt to manufacture goals in a changing league. He will get another job this summer. He deserves a change of scenery as much as the Bruins need a change behind the bench.
As a fan, I was never going to be satisfied with just one Stanley Cup. I wanted a dynasty. I realize how that must sound for Cleveland fans or Buffalo fans, but I really wanted the Bruins to become what the Chicago Blackhawks and Los Angeles Kings became instead this decade. They had a great #1 defenseman in Chara, good goaltending whether it was Tim Thomas or Tuukka Rask between the pipes, and different but dynamic forward talents in Patrice Bergeron, David Krejci, Tyler Seguin, and Brad Marchand. After winning the Stanley Cup in 2011, they drafted Dougie Hamilton, who was supposed to be the next great Bruins defenseman, scheduled to enter his prime when Chara would be getting up there in age, extending his career by shouldering more responsibility. When the Bruins fought and clawed their way to Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final against Chicago, it looked like a team that would be back again soon.
One of the most frustrating things about Bruins hockey in the nearly 20 years I’ve been following the team has been the incompatibility and organization impatience the team has had with talented players. The argument could be made that it started in the 70s when they traded a transcendent goal scoring talent in Phil Esposito to the Rangers, but that was a different time, the Bruins had gotten the best years out of Espo, and they got another Hall of Famer in defenseman Brad Park from New York in return. By the 2000s, the franchise best known for the likes of Bobby Orr, Espo, Ray Bourque, and Cam Neely was trading away Joe Thornton in his prime and in his eventual Hart Trophy winning season. In the years that followed, they drafted and subsequently traded away elite prospects in Phil Kessel, Seguin, and Hamilton (the latter two were drafted with the picks acquired when the B’s traded Kessel to Toronto). Each of those players had questions about their toughness, about their fight. None of them were prototypical Bruins in the way Orr or Bourque or Neely or Terry O’Reilly were, but how many of those guys really exist anymore? Orr and Bourque are two of the five best defensemen in the NHL’s expansion era, so most blueliners will disappoint next to those expectations, and the idea of fighting being as important a part as goal scoring in a player’s identity is went out of style faster than the idea of TV shows getting canceled before their time in the age of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.
When the Bruins won the Cup in 2011, there were 645 fights in the NHL regular season, but that number was down to 343 in the 2015-16 season. For further illustration of how sharp the decline has been, there were 347 fights in the lockout-shortened 2013 season just three years ago, which was also the last year the Bruins made a deep playoff run. This year’s inclusion of John Scott in the All-Star Game was a fun Internet gimmick that exposed how tone deaf a giant corporate institution like the NHL can respond to spontaneity, but it also served as a eulogy of sorts for the role of the Enforcer on a hockey roster in the world of high definition TVs, social media, and concussion lawsuits. The DNA of the Boston Bruins is firmly rooted in a style of play that is becoming less and less relevant by the minute. I realize that, many hockey writers and sports radio pundits realize that, and I think the Bruins front office realizes that, but I am not convinced they know any other way to build a roster. If they did, why would they give up an asset of any kind to acquire a player like Zac Rinaldo?
It’s one thing to value a star defenseman over a star goal scorer who does not fight or play defense when it’s the 70s, but to be the last team stuck in the past is never a place you want to be as a fan. The Red Sox will always hold the distinction of being the last team in Major League Baseball to sign a black player, and the Lakers will go down as the last NBA team to not embrace analytics. I would rather have my team always be good than stubbornly married to a specific style of play. I’m not saying they should be the Oakland A’s of hockey, where even if they’re bad, they’re intriguing, but if you’re an A’s fan, you should never invest in your favorite player’s jersey because he will get traded, but it would be nice to see the Bruins be one of the smart teams that stays ahead of the curve. MIT hosts the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and the other three Boston teams are known in their respective sport for being on the smarter side of average. The Bruins last two general managers are both Harvard educated, but from the outside looking in, both seem to be more about Old Time Hockey and other immeasurable sports cliches than staying ahead of trends in the game. The Bruins are living in the past so much that the biggest highlight of the 2015-16 season was beating the hated Montreal Canadiens in the Winter Classic Alumni Game…not the Winter Classic itself.
Besides the fans, the biggest victims of the last two seasons have been Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand. With the rest of the roster crumbling around them, they are as good as ever, and Marchand has transformed from the Little Ball of Hate to a legitimate NHL goal scoring threat. In another universe, if a couple of offseasons go differently (cough Seguin cough cough), Bergeron and Marchand could be the Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane of the Eastern Conference. Neither of them on the level of Toews or Kane, but the Eastern Conference isn’t on the level of the Western Conference, either. My buddy Luke and I were texting back and forth after the Bruins got eliminated, and our biggest fear is a long rebuild. Sure, I want the team to do it right, but I’d like to see them make some noise while Bergeron and Marchand still have their health. They are special players. They were the only scorers in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final in 2011 against Vancouver, they led the charge in the Game 7 comeback against Toronto in 2013, and they deserve more cracks at more Cups. I hope it’s in Boston.
The Case for John Scott
January 19, 2016 edit: Today, the NHL decided to make things right and confirmed that John Scott will be attending the All-Star Game in Nashville and will serve as the captain of the Pacific Division’s All-Stars despite getting traded to Montreal and being assigned to their AHL team in Newfoundland. Good job, NHL. My angry take on the matter from a couple days ago has been neutralized for the most part, but you can still read it below.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.
The National Hockey League has proven once again how out of touch it is with its fans. Not since the 2012 Lockout, in the months when before I started this blog, and was using my university’s newspaper as the outlet to vent my frustrations about the issues that plague the sport I love have I been so angry with the powers that be. I had mellowed out a bit as a hockey fan since then. Sure, Gary Bettman isn’t a great commissioner, but my focus was turned to the overwhelming incompetence of Roger Goodell at the helm of the NFL. Sure, the hockey owners are a collection of billionaires who made Mr. Potter from It’s A Wonderful Life look like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but NFL owners were no better, and in fact far worse given how much more profitable their league is and given that NHL player contracts are fully guaranteed, while NHL contracts are not. I had accepted that the NHL would not become bigger than the NBA, but recognized that the NBA was doing a lot of things really well from a business standpoint, and started to root for them to overtake the NFL in popularity. I thought there were things the NHL could do to improve their standing, and borrow from the way the NBA was growing their fanbase, and I thought that was working. All of that may still be true, but this week I cannot help but feel disgusted by the NHL, and feel sorry for John Freaking Scott of all people.
For those who haven’t been paying attention (and I can’t blame you if you haven’t), the NHL this year decided to change the format of the All-Star Game yet again. In the past, they’ve done Eastern Conference vs. Western Conference like the NBA always does, American players vs. Canadian players, North American players vs. European players, and had team captains pick the teams like it’s kickball in middle school gym class, and those are just the formats I can remember off the top of my head. This year, after the success of changing the regular season overtime format from 4 on 4 to 3 on 3, they decided to make the All-Star Game 3 on 3 as well. It is my understanding that there is still an aspect of the captains picking teams system (I’m not entirely sure, and I honestly don’t care enough about an exhibition game that has been seemingly changing on the fly as long as I’ve been following hockey), but the game itself would be injected with the fun skates-on-fire chaos that exists when each team has two fewer players on the ice. Considering all the different ways the NHL has tried to shake up the All-Star Game, and considering that they haven’t even played the All-Star Game half the time this decade because it gets cancelled any time there’s a work stoppage or the Winter Olympics, the NHL All-Star Game shouldn’t be taken too seriously, and should be fun, right?
Enter Jeff Marek of Sportsnet and Greg Wyshynski of Yahoo Sports. They host the popular hockey podcast Marek vs. Wyshynski, which I have pitched to my Boston area friends as Felger and Mazz if Felger and Mazz only talked about hockey and pop culture, and if Mike Felger was Canadian and sounded Canadian. They had the idea on their show of trying to get John Scott of the Arizona Coyotes, a career enforcer in an era when that role is declining faster than seven footers with no shooting range who can’t hit free throws and running backs taken in the top ten of the NFL Draft. According to Scott’s Hockey Reference page, the 32 year old Michigan Tech alumnus has played for six NHL teams, and has amassed a whopping five career goals to go with 542 penalty minutes. Marek and Wyshynski thought it would be amusing to see 6’8″ John Scott in a 3 on 3 situation, skating against the likes of Patrick Kane or Alex Ovechkin, in a situation that his coach would never trust him in a real game.
Marek vs. Wyshynski planted the seed of John Scott’s All-Star candidacy, but it was Reddit that took the idea and ran with it, because that’s how the Internet works in 2015-16. Scott ran away with the All-Star vote, and in doing so, generated more interest for the NHL All-Star Game than I can ever remember. One would think that the NHL would be excited about the publicity, that even if the buzz around the All-Star Game was Internet trolling (albeit in maybe the mildest form of trolling I’ve ever seen), at least it was generating buzz.
We live in a world where people feel like they need to be outraged about something at all times. That’s why Donald Trump is leading in the polls, that’s why air in a football in a blowout of an AFC Championship Game was treated like something that should actually be of concern, and that’s why members of the hockey media who for years thought of the All-Star Game as nothing more than a pointless exhibition are now upset over the sanctity of their precious tradition being tarnished by a goon like John Scott being voted in. Measures have been taken to take the All-Star rosters out of the hands of the fans, to prevent a national tragedy like this from happening again, but the way John Scott has been treated has been far worse.
Pacific Division All-Star Captain John Scott, as voted on by the fans.
Before I go any further, I should say that I am no fan of John Scott the player. In 2013, I wrote a post on this very blog saying that Scott gives hockey a bad name. I think the only reason he’s in the NHL is because he can fight. I am one of those people who believes that fighting still has a place in the game, but that fighting for the sake of fighting is a thing of the past. The best era of Bruins hockey in my lifetime could be called The Shawn Thornton Era. Shawn Thornton signed with the B’s after winning the Stanley Cup with Anaheim in 2007, and was a fixture of the team and the community until 2014. During that span, the Bruins became relevant again, made the playoffs every year, won the Stanley Cup, came within 17 seconds of Game 7 in another Stanley Cup Final, and won their first President’s Trophy in over 20 years. Thornton was the team’s enforcer, but was more than a fighter. He could actually play hockey, and while he was never any kind of offensive juggernaut, he did score ten goals in the 2010-11 season. That is my idea of what an NHL enforcer should be, and John Scott does not fit that mold. That being said, John Scott the person seems like a pretty funny guy (one time, he scored a goal and then had a t-shirt made depicting himself scoring a goal), and a family man. He seemed to be playing along with the joke quite nicely, and was excited to be a part of the All-Star festivities in Nashville with his wife (who is expecting another child) and children. One of the great things about the constant sports coverage we get thanks to the Internet is that we get to see the person behind the name, behind the actions on the ice that we may not like. It’s good to remember that the guy who is a punchline in hockey forums and on sports talk radio is actually a person, too. It’s all in good fun, or at least that’s what most people working outside the NHL offices who pay attention to this trivial story seemed to think.
According to Bob McKenzie, the NHL and the Arizona Coyotes asked Scott to bow out of the All-Star Game, and he refused. In response to that, the NHL did their best to make John Scott go away. This week, the Coyotes send Scott down to the minors, which is not unusual for a guy like Scott, who has been straddling the line between the NHL and AHL his entire career, and yesterday the Coyotes traded him to Montreal, where the Canadiens promptly assigned him to their AHL affiliate in St. John’s, effectively ending his eligibility for the All-Star Game unless the Habs decide to call him up to their NHL roster.
The weirdest thing about the way the John Scott situation was handled by the league is the way they passive-aggressively gave it the “nothing to see here” routine that made it a much bigger deal than conducting business as usual. Sending him to the AHL is one thing, but Arizona trading him to Montreal is another. I found out about Scott getting traded because I got a news alert from the Yahoo Sports app on my phone while I was at work. Because I’m too lazy to adjust the settings, I usually only get alerts that pertain to the Bruins (and the other Boston teams), unless it’s a really big deal. For instance, last week, I did not get an alert about the Ryan Johansen/Seth Jones trade between Columbus and Nashville even though two good young players taken with high picks in recent years moved in the deal. I had to find out about that one on Reddit, but “All-Star Captain John Scott has been traded to Montreal” was something my phone needed me to know right away.
If Scott got to play in the All-Star Game, it would be something to tune into. He wouldn’t be the first enforcer named to the All-Star Game. When Mike Milbury was coach of the Bruins, he selected Chris “Knuckles” Nilan to the All-Star team, and people were mad about it then, but at the end of the day, who really cares? The fact the Gary Bettman or whoever is pulling the strings with the Scott fiasco is going this far to discredit the fan vote seems to forget that the fans who vote for John Scott are the same people who are what make the NHL a viable business. If the league wants to grow, expanding the game to non-traditional hockey markets is certainly important, but so is embracing the weirdness of the fans you already have. John Scott’s All-Star candidacy should be celebrated for what it is: lots of people online trying to tweak with the fabric of an ultimately meaningless exhibition of a game that kids play on frozen ponds, but somehow the economy supports a system in which adults can get paid to play. It’s all supposed to be fun, and that should be obvious. Then again, this is the same league that has cancelled all or part of three different seasons because the billionaires are afraid of making too many players into millionaires at the expense of the fans, at the expense of the customers. Great, now I’m mad about the lockout again. Thanks, Bettman!
John Scott and Ray Emery Give Hockey a Bad Name
Hockey fans love their sport. They love the fast pace, the hard hits, the balance of skill and toughness, and they love when players drop the gloves to fight. Hitting and fighting are two polarizing issues that turn many away from the sport, and many within the sport want it taken out. I am personally a fan of hitting and fighting, and I feel they have a place in the game, but not every hit and every fight is necessary. It’s an issue that’s been talked about a lot lately as Bruins legend Bobby Orr has been promoting his new book and Orr was a good fighter and a staunch defender of fighting in hockey. The rules should be rewritten to keep the good hits and good fights in the game, but take out that which is detrimental to the game. That’s easier said than done, as evidenced by the confusion around the league’s “instigator penalty” that always seems to punish the wrong player more severely, but it would be a better solution than removing such a great aspect of the game entirely, and better for player safety than a completely laissez-faire system as well.
Two recent incidents provide the anti-violence faction with a lot of ammunition. On October 23rd, in a game between the Boston Bruins and Buffalo Sabres, Buffalo enforcer John Scott delivered a brutal open-ice hit to Bruins forward Loui Eriksson well after Eriksson dumped the puck into the offensive zone. Scott, who stands six feet and eight inches off the ground without skates, elbowed Eriksson in the head, concussing him. Scott is listed on Wikipedia as a defenseman/winger, but he only really only on the ice to hurt people, as evidenced by the one career goal he has scored since making his NHL debut in 2008. Last season, he fought Bruins enforcer Shawn Thornton (who is capable of a lot more than just fighting), and gabe him a concussion. The only player bigger than Scott in the NHL is Bruins captain Zdeno Chara, but Big Z means too much to the Bruins to waste his time and risk injury standing up to Scott. He made the hit at a time when the defending Eastern Conference Champion Bruins were leading the Sabres, maybe the worst team in the NHL, by two goals, and took an integral part of the Bruins roster out of the game with him on that hit. Loui started skating with the team again a couple days ago, but has not yet been cleared for contact and his return date is uncertain. For the hit, Scott was only suspended seven games by the NHL.
Even more recently, on Friday November 1st, the Washington Capitals held a 7-0 lead over another terrible team, the Philadelphia Flyers. Philly forward Wayne Simmonds started the action with Washington forward Tom Wilson. It wasn’t a necessary fight. He wasn’t avenging foul play or anything, but Simmonds was trying to do something to get his team fired up. That would have been all well and good for proponents of hockey fights, but Flyers netminder Ray Emery had to cross the line. Emery, who did not start the game but was on in relief (nor did he start a single game in the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup run last year despite getting his name etched on the Cup), skated across the red line and both blue lines to pick a fight with Caps’ goalie Braden Holtby, who had no interest in joining him. Holtby was pitching a shutout. Why would he want to drop the gloves and risk injury. Emery didn’t care. He was going to Holtby whether Holtby wanted to or not. Emery gave Holt by a few munches to the back of the head, which is illegal in MMA fighting, and the game escalated into a line brawl. The Flyers are going nowhere this season, especially after firing head coach Peter Laviolette last month, and Ray Emery decided to take out his frustration by trying to hurt a good goalie on a team that expects to be in the playoffs. The NHL announced that Emery would not be suspended for the incident.
I think most hits in hockey are clean, and most fights are defensible, but the ones that cross the line, like John Scott and Ray Emery, give hockey a bad name. When you try to defend fighting in hockey or the game of hockey itself, people will point to these incidents, as well as Todd Bertuzzi, Matt Cooke, Raffi Torres, Dale Hunter and others, as the faces of the game and the reason the NHL does not belong with the NBA, NFL, and MLB as a major sports league that sports fans should care about. It’s too bad. The NHL has exciting games, a great playoff tournament, athletes regular people can relate to, and the greatest trophy in all of sports, but all casual fans see is the goon show put on by these fringe players.
