Hockey Night's Alright for Fighting

It is a rite of winter in the world of hockey when fighting and its place in the NHL comes into question, and it is another rite when the status quo resumes when all is said and done. Fighting will continue because the powers that be wants it to, not because it deters dirty play and protects the stars, a patronizing explanation, for the same thing could be accomplished should the League make it a policy to hand out meaningful suspensions. When the brain trust of hockey deliberates, the much ado is just as illuminating as the nothing.

Sports owners are not exactly ahead of the curve, even if they are far beyond it in their respective "day jobs". There simply is no need to be, as having a major sports franchise is to be part of a coveted monopoly, insulated from the real life pressures that face other businesses. Life inside the womb often fosters a detachment from reality, rendering the whole much less than the sum of the parts, amply evidenced by Marvin Miller's continual outwitting of baseball's ownership decades ago, who could have been much better off by simply believing that the rules also applied to them. 

Yet hockey owners seem to be a couple steps behind even that. The NFL was farseeing in negotiating television deals collectively and instituting a salary cap, baseball has unearthed new piles of money through aggressively pursuing publicly funded stadiums, yet such innovation is absent in hockey. Perhaps stasis is the problem. The NFL had to fight to overtake baseball, baseball had to find new streams of income after football took over, while hockey has always remained in the background.

The spectacular rise of the UFC comes to mind, especially how it wisely embraced regulation. Before crossing its Rubicon, there was every possibility that its fan base would be alienated by removing the anything goes element that was at the core of its inception. Instead, the introduction of rules turned an event on the fringes into a legitimate sport, and so the followers grew.

Such risk taking seems beyond the reach of the NHL, who still insist that hits to the head, which often lead to injury and shortened careers, should not be penalized for it would threaten the very physical foundations of the game, ignoring the fact that the NFL penalizes hits to the head yet somehow manages to remain a contact sport.

But to say it's an issue of intellect would be oversimplifying things, especially where rule changes are concerned, as those are greatly influenced by the general managers.  As a group, they are mostly former hockey players who are by no means stupid, but they plied their trade during a time when even helmets were considered beneath them, and there is certainly the instinct to mould the game in their own image. 

And so the idiocy of touch icing continues, for according to the League, the rare occurrence of a forward beating the defenseman to the puck can fire up a team, to which one must ask, what about scoring a goal? In an effort to get more of those, the infamous goalie interference rule was implemented, where a goal could be disallowed if the attacking team even had a toe in the crease, regardless of any actual interference. This caused the League much embarrassment when it went unenforced after Brett Hull scored the Stanley Cup winner in overtime, as the players had already begun celebrating. 

One of the roots of the scoring problem was finally addressed with the crackdown on interference, but it took the fallout from the year long lockout to do that. And so for the role of fighting to be truly questioned, it will take something similarly significant, literally someone will have to die before the answer is something other than empty rhetoric.