NHL dead-on in purging goon behavior from hockey

Pavel Datsyuk of the Red Wings accepts the Lady Byng Trophy -- a standard to which all NHL players should aspire (image via Getty Images).

Some of my colleagues lamented the purging of tough play and hitting from the NHL in the past week as Alex Ovechkin shoved Brian Campbell into the boards, then James Wisniewski dropped Brent Seabrook like a rag doll.

These pundits grew up in an era when fights were supposedly as much an attraction for pro hockey as Bobby Hull’s 100 mph slapshots. That’s when a Lloyd Pettit radio play-by-play  (“a right, and another right…”) of a brawl rivaled that of Don Dunphy’s heavyweight-title fight in its cadence and intensity.

But what other sport exists where punching someone’s lights out, or giving an opponent a shove like a sadistic movie villain pushing the widow down the stairs. is considered just a necessary part of the game?

Football has enough violence and hitting built in without punches added to the mix. Basketball, supposedly a non-contact sport, has ‘em mix it up in the paint good enough; a foul could be called every second the ball goes inside if refs really wanted to play strictly by the rules. The game would turn into a farce if players took umbrage at every bit of rough contact.

Notice how baseball does not formally permit the old fashioned knockdown pitch anymore? Warnings are quickly issued to both benches by the home-plate umpire.

Sports are supposed to be exhibitions of skill, strength and smarts, not primal urges to fight. Hockey has been branded the world’s fastest sport because of the talents of its skaters stickhandling at high speeds. There will be enough incidental contact at such a pace.  So these days, the NHL acts quickly, like the next day, in punishing miscreants like Ovechkin and Wisniewski. There’s no drawn-out appeal process like in baseball.

I can’t believe people pine for the days when teams employed goons like Dave Schultz just to manhandle opposing star players, brutes whose only skill would have been better applied as a bouncer at a bar or collector of juice-loan payments.

And the lords of hockey had guilty consciences about their pugilists. Why else would they have issued a Lady Byng Trophy for sportsmanship each year?

All-time Hawks great Stan Mikita started his career ready to drop his gloves at a moment’s notice. Then he realized a higher calling. He became one of the game’s greatest centers without the need to fight.

I’m starting to do some more hockey coverage in Chicago. I’m not motivated to write about brawls and clashes when the better angle is the Hawks’ trying to right themselves going into the playoffs. If Jonathan Toews claims his team has the best set of skills in the game, let that be the main story, not  Ovechkin knocking out  Campbell for the season with a broken collarbone due to a play that had nothing to do with the flow of the game.

You cannot call the NHL a pansy league if it’s purged of fighting. No athlete is soft and delicate doing what hockey players do with skates and sticks, playing by the rules.