Bizarre, Society

Blackhawks Head To The Stanley Cup But Should The NHL Move To Deal With The Ducks

200px-ChicagoBlackhawksLogo.svgWe had a great party with friends to watch the seventh and final game of the Western Conference Championship last night. I was, of course, thrilled by the crushing win by the Hawks and the return of the team to the Stanley Cup. This is the third Stanley Cup appearance for the Blackhawks in five years. They have won five Stanley Cup championships since their founding in 1926 as part of the “Original Six” NHL teams with the Detroit Red Wings, Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, Boston Bruins and New York Rangers.

The series with the Ducks has been thrilling, though all of those overtime games played havoc with my sleep and schedule. I did not want to write about one aspects of the series until it was over however. I have long been a critic of how basketball now seems just a long series of fouls and free throws and how the same thing is happening in football where penalties are mounting for what seems accidental or natural moves by players. For that reason, I am the last person to argue for more penalties in professional sports but the Anaheim Ducks have changed my mind. The Ducks, a team with particularly large players, has been open about its primary method of playing hockey: hits. Indeed, one of my least favorite players, Ryan Kesler, bragged about how the team was punishing the Hawks with huge hits and promised his fans ““No human can withstand that many hits.” Well, they did but that does not mean that this is how hockey should be played.

Anaheim_Ducks.svgI thought the Ducks played like thugs. That included an earlier game penalty involving Clayton Stoner’s crosscheck to Andrew’s Shaw’s face or the Ducks defenseman doing a crosscheck square in the back of Marcus Kruger. Then there was the unsportsmanlike conduct that seems to be the signature for the Ducks. For example, millions watched as Duck Corey Perry went over during one of the earlier games and just grabbed the stick of Blackhawks forward Marian Hossa. Hossa tried to pull his stick away but Perry just stood there in the middle of the ice taunting him and not letting it go. Rather than take the bait, Hossa let go of his stick and skated away. Perry then stood there holding the stick and eventually threw it to the ice. No penalty.

The way that the Ducks play sends an awful message to kids and takes away from the game itself. There was some incredible hockey played in these games, but the Ducks continually returned to hits and taunts. I know that I will receive a barrage comments from the “that’s how the game is played” crowed but that is not true. Hits are and will remain part of hockey but there should be some limit. When the Ducks were sputtering out last night there were a couple of hits that were vicious and gratuitous. There needs to be some imposition of rules of adult conduct for teams like the Ducks.

The clearly stronger team won last night and it also happened to be the better team. I say this not as a lifelong Hawks fan. I would be equally critical if poor conduct was coming from my side (as has been the case with the Bears recently in the McDonald debacle). The Ducks are an example of the need for reform in the NHL to deal with unsportsmanlike conduct in my humble opinion.

48 thoughts on “Blackhawks Head To The Stanley Cup But Should The NHL Move To Deal With The Ducks”

    1. wonderer – Disney makes R-rated films under their Touchstone label. The Mouse can be lustful.

  2. The Cubs, da Bears and the Blackhawks. Chicago has it all. Now if Obama was a Cubs fan instead of a White Sox fan then I would be a bigger fan of him. Chicago also has good educational institutions. Good lawyers. One of these days some law professor up there will go into politics and be our President. It is only a matter of time.

  3. There should be absolutely no sanction at all. There is no rule one could point to as cause for punishment (unless you go with the arbitrary best interest of the game). Attaining many penalties in a game does not trigger a suspension.
    There would be little to no precedent for imposing rules on the teams players. This isn’t a todd bertuzzi case. This was a strategy. Be more physical against the more finesse team.
    Let the hockey players have their liberty!

  4. @Nick

    I made the connection because I find it ignorant or disingenuous to have multiple posts deriding or decrying religion, and then have the gall to complain about unsportsmanlike conduct.

  5. Possible sweep by the Hawks against TBL, much to the dismay of the NHL and its advertisers.

  6. ”
    Those responsible for these darling divinities would have us believe that they ”represent the link between Greek history and the modern Olympic Games.” This appeal to the ancients and their culture is a standard trope — one that, for obvious reasons, is being invoked more relentlessly than usual in the current Olympiad. But however much we love to cite the Greeks as a pristine standard, as models for contemporary culture, we do so at no little risk; we may like to think of ourselves as Greek, but the fact is that much of classical thought and culture is extremely foreign to us.

    So too, all too obviously, with Athena and Phevos, whose demotion from august divinities to harmless cartoons is, if anything, emblematic of the way in which our Games differ from those of the ancient Greeks. This is nowhere more true than in the very engine of the Games: the idea of competition itself. Strangers to Biblical notions of selflessness and neighbor-loving, the Greeks experienced their quadrennial festivals of raw and often vicious competitiveness utterly free of the vague sense of guilt that we feel today when it comes to expressing the primitive desire to utterly crush an opponent — a guilt that expresses itself in precisely the kind of kitsch sentimentality that is, perhaps, the only thing Athena and Phevos really represent.

    Everything about the ancient Olympics was darker, rougher, more brutal than its modern counterpart — no matter how much more competitive the modern Games have become since their inception, in 1896, as a tribute to the spirit of gentlemanly amateurism. Ancient Games had their origins as somber celebrations of death.

    The earliest reference in Western literature to funeral games is Homer’s description, in the 23rd book of the ”Iliad,” of the games that Achilles ordered to commemorate the death of his companion, Patroclus; all four of the great Greek athletic competitions that constituted what was called the ”circuit” — the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian Games, some held every four years, some every two — had their cultic origins either in commemorations of the deaths of mythic mortals or monsters. One anthropological explanation for the close association of ancient Games with funerals is a primitive practice according to which, when someone was killed, a fight to the death would be held between the suspected killer and another man; with the irrefutable logic of superstition, the loser was then judged to have been the guilty party.

    Death was, indeed, by no means a stranger at the Greek Games, particularly in the ”heavy” events like boxing or pankration, a kind of all-out boxing cum wrestling that was considered the acme of combat sports. But what strikes us now is not even how often athletes died, but how willing to die they were. During a pankration match in the Olympics of 564 B.C., as a competitor lurched around the ring half-dead, his trainer suggested that ”full dead” was the hero’s option: ”What a noble epitaph,” he is said to have shouted, ”not to have conceded at Olympia!”

    This seems extreme but is entirely in keeping with the Greek ethos. Part of the reason the ancient Games were so uncompromising and often violent has to do with what was at stake. The Greeks, for the most part, had no heaven; with some notable exceptions, good and bad all went to the same gray, characterless, drizzly underworld after death, and that was that. In the absence of a post-mortem reward for moral goodness, the one thing you could strive for was immortal fame — doing something so glorious that men would talk of you in years, centuries, millenniums to come.

    And so, whereas today’s Olympic committee prefers to ”celebrate humanity” (an official slogan of contemporary Olympiads), the Greek athlete wanted only to be celebrated himself; it was his one ticket to immortality.

    But the desperate rawness of the battlefield — and its stark, all-or-nothing logic — was never very far beneath the surface.

    The problem, of course, is that such notions are wholly foreign to the Greek way of thinking, which actually has more in common with the relentless egotism, nationalism, promotion and self-promotion of athletes we associate with professional sports than with any fantasy of the noble Greek spirit. A lot of the sentimentality of the modern Olympics — the relentless emphasis on human-interest drama, the uncomfortable efforts to maintain the thin pretense that politics are absent, the ceaseless rhetoric of pure athleticism, even after the all-amateur rules were abandoned — looks, if anything, like the uncomfortable byproduct of our compensatory desire to graft Judeo-Christian values onto the irreducible, very ancient and very ugly business of competitiveness.”

    What Olympic Ideal?

    The New York Times

    Published: August 8, 2004

    Daniel Mendelsohn, author of a scholarly study of Euripides and has been a lecturer in classics at Princeton University since 1994.

  8. The best thing that happened for the Blackhawks in my lifetime was Bill Wirt dying.

  11. “There is nothing Judeo-Christian about good sportmanship.”

    Paul,
    The ancient Hebrews paid the price for ignoring their covenant with God. Law and Gospel, rules and fair play are absolutely embedded in the Judeo-Christian philosophy. It’s when society attempts to ignore moral absolutes (rules) and play outside of those fixed principles that we get into trouble. The Blackhawks are the antithesis of moral relativism and they prevailed. 🙂

  12. There have been various ways to counter the animal hockey that seems to surface every once in a while. The Flyers, Islanders, and some other teams were so disgusting in the 70s that visiting Russian teams, teams that were far more talented simply quit playing during exhibition games rather than sacrifice their players to unnecessary hits. Then came the era of the super player like Gretzky who was simply not big enough like a Howe or a Messier to take a big hit. Teams developed a policing system of attaching a McSorely to a Gretzky or a Semenko. If a player hit Gretzky unnecessarily hard then Semenko or McSorely would seek him out soon after and disregarding the consequences of his team being short handed for two or five minutes, beat the living cr*p out of the offender. It worked and then developed into other strategies. Semenko eventually was used to start a fight to get the opposing player to hit him as long as he wanted. The referee would tally up the punches and Semenko would get a two minute penalty and the guy that he allowed to hit him until it was broken up got a five minute penalty. Thus the nick name ‘Cement Head Semenko’.

    Just as in football in the 70s some people have to get seriously hurt before the refs come down on the players. Hockey is a beautiful game but there will always be the line between enough ‘hitting’ to make the game interesting and too much.

    This reminds me of one of the greatest all time players who had it all: craft, size, intelligence, and the ability to understand, Gordie Howe. A former Maple Leaf who was at the time a Member of Parliament in Ottawa told of his rookie year when he gave Howe an unnecessary hard check, just to let Howe know he was there, testing the waters. Howe ignored him until a little later and then came by at breakneck speed extremely close but not hitting the rookie. The rookie was just a little shaken up and then noticed a stinging sensation under his chin. Howe had clipped the rookie’s chin with the top of the handle of his stick just enough to scratch it and draw a little blood. That is the way it should be done but unfortunately some teams have to resort to the ‘Cement Head Semenko’ routines.

  13. “The Stanley Cup does not belong in Florida.” Thaaaank you! My thoughts exactly. Hawks are one of the original six and they have a rich history. Bobby and Dennis Hull, the scrappy Stan Makita, Tony Esposito… That was an era. Nick is right: the NHL used to be quite the violent place. The Flyers for sure, but the Bruins and the Habs always had their share of tough guys, too. Remember Stan Jonathan? Dude was about four feet tall but he would invariably knock down guys twice his size, guys like Andre Dupont or Larry Robinson. But I’m just getting nostalgic now.

  14. The best team won and the Ducks aren’t the first NHL team to try to bully their way to the top. I do not think any sanctions are needed. The fact that they lost another game 7 might be enough incentive to clean up their act.

  15. To understand anything one must have a historical perspective. I went to college in PA. My graduation speaker was Douglas Edwards, the CBS anchor prior to Walter Cronkite. Many of my fellow classmates were from Philly. It was on that May afternoon in 1974 the Broad Street Bullies beat the Boston Bruins, 1-0, in Game 6 Final w/ the great, Bernie Parent in goal. This was the Flyers first Stanley Cup Championship in the sports dungeon of Philly. Many of the Philly grads had transistor radios and inappropriate cheers befuddled poor Mr. Edwards as he spoke.

    The Flyers in the early 1970’s make these Ducks look like choir boys. NHL Hockey in significantly less thuggish than it was back then. I watched the Ducks while I was in San Diego, getting many of their games on cable. They are a big, tough, team. They can be chippy. I watched much of this series JT is crying about. The Ducks are bigger and tougher than the Blackhawks. When the chips were down they crossed the line a few times. JT needs to research the Flyers when he was in grade school. There is a 30/30 ESPN documentary on the Broad Street Bullies and it shows not only how criminally thuggish the Flyers were, but how dirty the entire league was back then. To JT I will simply say, put on your big boy pants. The Blackhawks won. I am not a Blackhawks fan per se, but since living in Chicago and attending many games in the great Chicago Stadium, they have been the team I have followed most closely. They are the team I would take my son to see several times a year. He is a BIG Hawks fan. I will be pulling for the Blackhawks. The Stanley Cup does not belong in Florida.

  16. The NHL, like the NBA, is trying to pull itself out of a financial hole. There was an article written about the financial see statuses of both the NHL and the NBA: More than half the teams in both leagues are struggling to make a profit. It wouldn’t surprise me if the fights and/or ‘rough playing’ of the NHL is a method to attract new fans and/or keep the current fans coming to the arena. Didn’t the NBA and NHL follow the NFL’s method of using revenue sharing methods to help out the less profitable teams?

  17. Sportsmanlike conduct has its origins in Western civilization’s use of Judeo-Christian limits on behavior, and the tradition of fairness in competition that resulted ever since, even, sometimes, in battle.

    The Ducks represent barbarianism, an increasing presence in the U.S. (See Ferguson, ISIS).

    Mock religion as you will, but there has been little in human history to tame barbarians the way faith has done.

    You can appeal to all sorts of humanitarian reasons to support being a good sport, but absent sin, and the threat of paying for one’s transgressions at the end of the human’s ‘third period,’ there is literally nothing to favor sportsmanship over being a hockey thug.

    This is what happens when you hack at the roots of civilization.
    You can’t argue for sportsmanship ex nihilo.

    1. Pogo – the Greeks were using good sportsmanship during the Olympics. There is nothing Judeo-Christian about good sportmanship. Read the battle sequences by the Jews in the Old Testament. Hardly fair play. 🙂

  18. Congratulations to the Blackhawks. Hmmm, this story sounds eerily familiar.
    1. Weaker side follows the rules (principled = skilled)
    2. Stronger side ignores the rules (unprincipled = thug mentality)
    3. Referee’s let the two sides play
    4. Appeals to the refs for fair play go largely unanswered.
    5. Demands by fans and players for enforcement of the rules gain momentum.
    6. Rules become enforced; integrity of the game restored.
    7. Greater emphasis placed on acquiring skilled players over thugs becomes popular.

  19. Yes Hockey is still too lenient when it comes to hard hits and cheap shots. I feel for Marcus Kruger who absorbed a huge hit from, I believe Ryan Kesler. There was no advantage to making the hit other than cruelty. It was a late hit. I noticed the Blackhawks held Brian Bickell off the ice, perhaps to avoid foolish retaliation. Hockey needs to penalize the late hit.

  20. I always thought that hockey was a series of fights broken up periodically by someone scoring. It may be time to bring back the Hanson brothers.

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