The NHL, injuries and suspensions

I wrote yesterday about some of the longterm effects of an injury in the NHL. Today, I'd like to wrte about a gap in the NHL's disciplinary process as it relates to injuries and suspensions.

The Vancouver Canucks have lost a lot of player-games to injury this year, but one of the most galling recent events was the knee-on-knee check to rookie Mason Raymond which could have ended his career before it's properly begun. No penalty was assessed on the play. No suspension handed out subsequently, but even if this weren't the Canucks, my home town team, we were talking about, I would still say that when a single check results in injuries, especially to the head, the kneck, the spine or a knee, something more needs to be done.

Even if the hit itself is "clean" from a hockey point of view, the play should be reviewed for intent to injure. And the standard at that point should turn on its head: guilty (at least to some extent) unless proven innocent beyond all reasonable doubt. The guilt could perhaps be pro-rated but the player causing the injury should be suspended for at least half the games that the victim misses as a result of the injury, at least for one season's worth of games. Some have said that coaches are culpable for the injuries their players inflict when there's cause to believe that the coach said, "Go get him, boys." But if a coach knew that some of his players could be lost to him if they do serious damage to the other players, then they would be less likely to let any dogs of war slip.

By that rule, I know, Bertuzzi would probably have been out for much longer after the Steve Moore incident. But conversely, the Steve Moore incident might never have happened because Moore would have been off for all or most of the games that Näslund was missing as a result of the concussion and there wouldn't have been the sense of injustice that set up that incident in the first place.

In the same way, Mason Raymond's checker would be gone now, too, to the detriment of his team -- and if that had been the potential price, waiting at the boards with knee extended as was done to Raymond, might have been coached out of the perp's common practice. Clean, hard hits are one thing. Clean, hard hits with slew-footed variations are quite another and if the NHL really cared about the long-term health of its players, the punishments would fit the crimes. They wouldn't be subject to the whims of a league office whose decisions are open, all too often, to charges of partiality on grounds that most fans cannot begin to understand, especially those that have watched one or the other of their stars be sidelined for significant numbers of games.