Quick Follow-Up on Fighting: Burke's Colton Orr comments

  I have a lot of sympathy with Brian Burke (Maple Leafs general manager).  From what I can tell on Sports Centre, he seems to feel like he was forced into a decision that he didn't want to make by circumstances beyond his control.    Circumstances, moreover, that he decries.
  He has placed his tough-guy, his heavyweight enforcer Colton Orr, on waivers.  He accompanied this with some pronouncements about the state of the game, announcing that it's a sad state of affairs when such a player as Orr cannot hold down a spot on an NHL roster.  I think Burke, in this press conference, is doing a great thing for Orr; this might be the very best way for a general manager to tell a player that he didn't want to send him down, that his hand was forced.  And I think the sentiment on Burke's part is genuine; he is known, anyway, according to  Sports Net, to be very empathetic when dealing with his players, and I respect him for that.
  However, it's interesting to look at the reasons by which Burke diagnoses a problem in the game.  Excerpted from a Canadian Press article, 5th January:

If you want a game where guys can cheap shot people and not face retribution, I'm not sure that's a healthy evolution [...] (Shanahan) needs a telephone receptionist in his house because of all of this crap that's going on on the ice. [...] These guys that won't back it up, won't drop their gloves, run around and elbow people in the head and hit people from behind. They never have to answer for that in the game, they used to have to answer for that in the game.  [...] The players (used to) police the game and now it's Brendan Shanahan.  You see guys that run around and start stuff and won't back it up and it makes me sick to my stomach. [...] [And because the game is this way now,] [T]here's no dance partner for Colton [and so he'll have to play for the Marlies].

  Brian Burke is against cheap shots, and so am I.  And the new equipment changes have probably led to the same invulnerability problems as people have been discussing in football (watching those old Canadiens games on DVD, before they had hard plastic shields all over their bodies, it was remarkable how few unnecessary collisions there were - or not so remarkable when you consider how much more it would have hurt back then, just on a play-to-play bruising sort of level, to collide more) and this invulnerability has probably led to more cheap shots.  And, as I described in the last post, I think that some fights probably do ease bad blood between teams, resolve these cheap shots, and (this is more of a logical stretch) reduce their occurrence.
  However, because they don't always work, I think a rule structure like the one I put up last post might be of help in keeping fights from getting out of hand.  On that Sports Net, they cited a statistic that the proportion of games in which at least one fighting major is handed out is one in three, and the CP article cited that fighting occurs on an average this year of 0.8 fights per game, down from 1.2 last year.  The effect of my proposal (I hope) would be to keep the first proportion more or less the same, but reduce the number of multi-fight games, so that the second proportion would drop a bit.  That aside from the main point, which is to remove the push-and-shove scrums that delay the restart of a game and are much, much less fun to watch.
  But Burke is correct that hockey is a game in which players police each other.  This is not so true of other games, like basketball or soccer, where I think there is much less morality and ethics between players, and much more reliance upon the referee to police the game; the rules are very technical and do the least amount of blame-assignment or moral judging of the player committing the foul.  That's why, for example, intent to foul and flagrantness (flagrance?) is not included in the assessment of fouling-out a basketball player, only the technical fact of  touching of the opponent's shooting arm happening five or six times.
  Hockey would not accept this in its penalty system.  Imagine a league in which one could be ejected from the game for too many occurrences of hand-passes, offsides, or icings; or even for repeated commission of minor, non-dangerous fouls such as hooking, holding, or being the seventh player on in a too-many-men situation. The rules consider the chain of several minor penalties enough of a punishment, and this makes sense to us hockey fans, no matter how much we may be annoyed at repeated hooking by the same member of the opposite team.
  No, hockey is a player-policed sport, like, I guess, baseball.  Thus the presence of fist-fights and knockdown pitches: players need to enact a judgment on other players who break the rules, and generally take much more freedom to do so, in that they make use of more extra-curricular activities to get it done.  In soccer, of course, one may tackle a particularly hated opponent extra hard, but it very rarely happens that one can do much to seek him out: one must wait until play brings one together with them.  In basketball, there is the same sort of thing with hard fouls.  Fighting, and to a lesser extent knockdown pitches, are different, and come from a player-policed sport.
  However, players in hockey and baseball do not police themselves, as they do in cricket, golf, or Ultimate Frisbee.  One is not expected in hockey (or baseball) to report one's own foul like is the case in those sports: "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'" makes sense in hockey and (of course) baseball, but the sentiment is anathema in cricket or golf.  Comparing baseball players and cricketers, you will see cricketers do odd things like walk off the pitch when they believe that they are out, even if the umpire deems them not-out, or protesting that they did, in fact, trap and not catch a ball in the air, only to be overruled by the umpire or even the opposing batsman, who will insist that, in fact, it was a good catch and I'm out.  Could you imagine this in baseball?  No, you could not.  In baseball, one is expected on close plays to assume that one made the play, and let the moral weight rest upon the umpire.
  Hockey will never be like cricket, nor should it be.  But there is another way: sports where players do some policing of each other, but players rarely step out of line because they make an agreement about policing themselves with the referee.  In effect, the moral burden is shared by players and referees more or less equally.  Professional boxing is like this, as is rugby so far as I can understand, two very tough sports.  In each sport, the referee is constantly talking to the players.  "You can't pick up that ball." "Keep those punches up."  There are too many infractions to count in a typical boxing round or rugby maul, but the referee generally lets play continue so long as no unduly unfair advantage is obtained.  I remember in particular watching old tapes of the Lennox Lewis - Mike Tyson match. Both boxers did a lot of pure boxing, but both used underhanded tactics as well: Tyson would duck and barge in at Lewis, driving his had into the taller man's navel and working the body.  Ducking is much less often called in the pros as in amateur boxing, but it does happen.  It could have been called here.  Lewis reacted, of course, by holding.  Lewis's alternative was, of course, either to let Tyson continue to punch his gut, or to foul him with a kidney punch.  At any rate, the referee (I forget who) chose to penalize Lewis  for holding instead of Tyson for ducking or failing to protect himself (I can't remember if he actually took a point away; anyway Tyson probably got in more body shots in the early rounds than he otherwise might have).  With a different ref, the call could have gone the other way, or the fight could have been a much uglier one, with a lot more wrestling and a lot less boxing (Tyson might have lasted the distance in that case).  As it was, the announcers speculated that Tyson was being slightly favoured in the calls to even up the fight somewhat.
  The idea is very similar to hockey.  While technically illegal, and not making for the best theatre, Tyson's and Lewis's strategies never really went beyond the pale (no repeated low blows or headbutting, no biting of the ears) and so the referee used his discretion to define the boundaries for this contest, and the contestants adjusted, and after a certain point, ceased to push the envelope and got down to fighting under the conditions that had been set.
  In hockey it's the same, except for that last part.  The referees are supposed to manage a game without "getting in its way," which I suppose means not overturning a team's entire strategy or style of play because of systematic violations of minor rules; instead letting either team adjust to the other's style, within and without the rules.  Thus the expectation that after the referee "establishes his authority" in the first period, his whistle should be more and more "kept in his pocket" as the game wears on.
  But in hockey, I find, often a stable equilibrium is not reached.  The players, first, continue to try to push the envelope.  Then, as that happens, they don't put their trust in the referee to reestablish his authority; instead they police each other.  That's how games "get away from the ref."  In boxing, one sees ear-punching or retaliatory low blows, because the contestants can't trust each other to win or lose fairly.  In hockey, shoving matches, fistfights, and the occasional super-dangerous sneak-attach cheap shot, à la McSorley.
  Well, this post is about seventeen times longer than I thought it would be.  I'll close then by trying to suggest a remedy.  I don't think hockey will ever approach rules technically like soccer, or basketball; nor through self-policing like cricket.  I do think, though, that maybe it could learn a little from rugby, or even (here's an irony in violence-reduction) from boxing.  And I don't think that league offices are going to be able to fix it, but nor to I totally trust the Colton Orrs of the NHL to fully fix this.  
  I think that it's distinctly possible that dangerous cheap shots are more common now than they were a several years ago, or even a few decades ago.  And maybe there's a reason that links a perceived decrease in fistfights and an increase in sneak-attacks.  But I think, maybe, the best way to get a handle on this problem is to have referees and players talk to each other more.  I'd like to see something like, "Look, Coach, you've got a couple wingers in your team, we both know who they are, who are throwing around some elbows [or hooking, or mini-slashing, or whatever aggravating and potentially dangerous thing it might be].  I won't catch every one, but if they don't cut it out I won't have any qualms about calling a soft roughing penalty.  You've earned it already, anyway."   Maybe we could get something like that, with the refs emphasizing penalty calls in the interest of arresting the most disrespectful or objectionable patterns of conduct, instead of reacting only to the most flagrant and obvious fouls.  Hopefully, players and teams could accept the boundaries so imposed, and the occasional "cut it out" soft penalty against them, and agree with the ref that the rule interpretation has been negotiated, and now it's time to play the game.  Then maybe we can address Mr Burke's valid complaints about cheap-shots and integrity.

Five for Fighting

      I love hockey.  I just spent like thirty bucks on DVDs of old Canadiens games, all the way back to Maurice Richard's last game in 1960, just because I love the game, the history, the skills and the contests.  I played lots of rec-league ice hockey as a kid, and I really need to join a shinny league one of these days because I miss it so much.  I still go skating a few times each year, just to keep my hand in. 

      I don't love hockey fights.  I say this as a recreational athlete, as a sports fan, and as a fight fan.  They are not usually good or entertaining fights. I don't really like the way they divide teams into "tough guys" and "skill guys", "legitimate" and "illegitimate" targets for violent play.  Mostly, though, I don't like the way they delay the game.  Fights themselves, of course, are not the worst offenders here; the worst is when players mill around, push and shove, threaten and mock, and decide whether or not they are actually going to scrap.  Alternatively, it is tedious when two players have decided to scrap beforehand, and milk out the preparations for as long as possible –  taking off their helmets, running their fingers through their hair, circling each other at centre ice – in short, behaving as if the fight is more important to the spectacle than actually playing hockey.

      That is the motivating factor behind my modest proposal to limit the fights, and more so the time-wasting near-fights, that get in the way of the enjoyment of the game.

      This proposal does not envision the complete eradication of fisticuffs from the game.  The main things it should accomplish are to reduce the chances of a particular game being slowed by multiple fights, and to reduce the attempt to use fighting as a team tactic to make the opponent's skilled players sit in the penalty box.  Nothing all that much would change otherwise: just fewer games with too many fights or near-fights, so that you wish they could just play the game to the end, and fewer teams trying to use fights as a negative tactic to pull other teams down to their level.

      I don't advocate totally removing fights here.  I'm not sure, yet, how I feel about that.  I recognize that fights in hockey are more than just random hooliganism, and I respect the idea that they sometimes clear the air between teams that have bad blood.  I also, though, make note of the observation that many other big-time sports manage without fisticuffs, that fights can be dangerous, and that a so-called "hockey purist" might be annoyed at a coarsening of the product he or she enjoys so much.  I can't decide whether or not hockey would be better off with something close to zero fights, so I won't demand zero fights here.

      However, there are steps that could be taken to ensure that there are a sufficient number of fights to satisfy the honour of all parties, as the culture of hockey seems to demand, without having to deal with scrums all game.  I am going to draw inspiration from another sport to help us out here. 

      In baseball, the culture has worked out a way of dealing with the conflict between batter and pitcher for position on the near side of the plate.  They haven't always had this worked out, of course.  Before batting helmets, players used to die occasionally in the majors or the minors after being hit with a pitch.  Career-threatening injuries used to occur with greater frequency than now.  I recommend Bill James's excellent article on the history of the beanball, which charts trends in throwing at batters, in injuries and deaths, and in rule-changes.  Right now, baseball has what seems to be a pretty good system.  Here's how they manage, as I understand it.  They did not do away with the brushback, and a batter is still struck with the baseball every now and then without any penalty more severe than the awarding of a base.  However, throwing in the vicinity of the head too often, or striking a batter on or near the head with a pitch, causes the umpires to take the following action: the pitchers on both teams are warned, and anything resembling a beanball by either side thereafter for the rest of the game will result in the ejection of the pitcher.

      The idea seems to be, here, that the pitcher can be aggressive in intimidating the batter or otherwise convincing him to back away from the inside part of the plate, but the aggression is permitted only up to a point.  This point is measured by beanballs.  The idea seems to be that the pitchers might, while behaving within the accepted limits of aggression, be expected to have the odd game where a player is struck near the head with the ball.  However, twice in a game is more than what is expected, and indicates that the pitchers are either too aggressive, too wild, or perhaps even too possessed of an intent to injure the opposition to be allowed to continue pitching.

      I propose that an analogous system, measuring for acceptable levels of belligerence, be used in big-time hockey.  As in baseball, it would be up to the refereeing crew's discretion to determine when they think the levels have become unacceptable and to change the ruleset to deal with the problem, making the punishment for fighting more severe thereafter.  This would apply to individual players during a game and also, between games, to teams.  A player who goes over the limit in one game would be ejected, and maybe suspended from the next game.  A team that has players going over the limit too often should have penalties such as suspensions of the head coach, fines or revenue stoppages from the team coffers or no-home-crowd games.  This will ensure that fewer games will be slowed by fighting, and fewer teams will systemically require their players to fight for tactical reasons.  There could be disputes over the permissible level of belligerence, but the core concept is that when the threshold is crossed, the rules should become stricter and heads should cool.

      For that is one of the most oft-cited rationales for hockey fighting, usually mentioned along with the need to fire up one's own team: to clear the bad blood between teams or players.  This is how it is supposed to work.  Stanley and Bob are about to fight, for the following reason.  Earlier in the game, or in a previous game, Stanley, or a teammate of Stanley's, laid a dirty hit on, or otherwise insulted or crossed a line with, Bob or a teammate of Bob's.  So Bob has a grievance, and Stanley is out of polite society; thus, there exists a state of bad blood between them.  However, in the blows of a fight, Bob can achieve satisfaction of his grievance, and Stanley can regain his place in polite society.  Fighting is thus an honour-bound and honour-serving activity that can resolve grievances.  I believe this is true of any combat carried out by rules to the satisfaction of both parties, witness the affectionate way two boxers hug after a good, clean fight.

      However, the fight does not always resolve the bad blood.  Sometimes it fails to deliver satisfaction to both parties; sometimes a new grievance can arise because of the fight.  Once this sort of thing happens, we can see a cycle of revenges, or just an explosion of violence: thus those games where a team that's behind four goals in the third period will manage to fight seven fights in that frame, and to find the energy to mill around tugging jerseys after every whistle, until the third period takes longer to play than the first two.  In this case, the initial fights failed to clear the air and prevent the further ones, or maybe each team was just too belligerent by that point.  It is at this juncture that the referees should be empowered to step in.

      This is how I would make the rule work.

      The penalty for the plain, run-of-the-mill, equally instigated fight should remain the current offsetting five for fighting penalties.  The current extra penalties for instigation or third player joining a fight should also remain

       However, I would then instruct the referees to warn both benches.  The idea being, OK, you've had your scrap, now it's time to settle down.  After this point, fighting, or failing to follow the instructions of the referees in such a way that would lead to fighting, would cause match penalties.  Instigators, if they were unequally from one team, would cause their team to play shorthanded for two minutes at least.

      I'll give some examples of what would happen after the referee has warned the benches.  If, after the whistle blows, two players get into each other's face, the linesmen would not, as they do now, have to bodily haul them apart.  If the players resist the linesmen's attempt to separate them, those players would be ejected.  If someone stops too close to a goalie, and then everyone starts tugging at each other's jerseys and shoving, then someone should be ejected from each team, the coaches choosing one of the players that was on the ice at the time.  If one player starts cruising around and jabbing at opponents after the whistle, looking for a fight, and doesn't knock it off when the referee instructs him to, he should be ejected and his team should have to play shorthanded for a while. 

      These are all measures that are stronger than what occurs now during a game, and all are designed to cut down on the delay that fighting and milling about cause.  Indeed, the referees should have the power to warn both benches even if a good match of fisticuffs has not ensued, if they have become tired of having to haul players apart and herd them away from a shoving match.  It would be a great way to move the game along.

      However, the rules need another addition.  In hockey, fighting is often not done entirely be free choice of the combatants.  The team and coaches have a lot of influence over whether or not a player will act as an enforcer.  The only way to truly get a lid on the fighting is to make it unprofitable to teams to fight too often, or have players acting as enforcers too much of the time.  So we need to penalize not only players who fight, but teams that show a pattern of fighting. 

      The first step is to increase the perceived cost of acting like an enforcer.  I should say that an ejection for fighting after the benches have been warned should lead to a suspension, and that the suspension should grow with the number of such infractions.  Maybe the first two such occurrences in the season should result in one or zero games of suspension, but at the third incident, suspensions would start climbing a ladder in severity, a couple games at a time.  If there is a player who could face six or ten games in suspensions for his next fight, the team will be less likely to encourage him to fight.  I should also recommend that consecutive games in which a player fights should lead to a one-game suspension, even if the fights were before the bench warnings, like the approach used for consecutive yellow cards in most soccer competitions.

      That's still too much focus on blaming one player, though.  The next level of control should be at the level of the team as a whole.  A team that fights too much, as measured maybe by consecutive games fighting, could face such penalties as suspension of the head coach for a game, loss of the crowd for a home game – I like the possibility that playing in an empty home arena would impress everyone on the bench, and having to refund the gate would impress the team brass – or for more, even fines or revenue stoppages for the team to get the ownership annoyed.  Maybe the first incidence of consecutive games with fights would lead to head coach suspension, maybe after three occurrences of players being ejected after the referee has warned the benches, the team loses the crowd for a home game.  I'm not sure here.

      Anyway, the idea is not to aggressively legislate fighting out of the game, but to limit it so that it does not delay too many games, or get too much out of hand, and is not used as an underhanded tactic by certain teams.  I am OK with fighting to redress the occasional major grievance, or as the occasional result of losing one's temper in the scrum along the boards, but I feel like it ought not to happen too frequently.  Players should be allowed to be belligerent enough such that the occasional game could have one or a couple fights, but not so as to turn too many games into sloppy boxing matches, or shirt-tugging contests. 

      I am open to dispute as to how occasional the fighting should be, or if a system based on one fight a game is the right level of control.  Once I find some readers, I look forward to comments.