Thursday, March 10, 2011

The NHL has gone Crazy

I wasn't going to write this blog because so many people have been blogging, twittering and commenting everywhere about the pure insanity of the NHL over the last two days but my outrage and disdain needs a place to go. So here it goes.

As a Habs fan I am slightly biased about the Chara/MaxPac hit, but as a hockey fan I can move that bias to the side and look at the whole picture of this season and of all teams. The NHL has gotten to the point where bad hits, from marginal players is at an epidemic proportion. What does the league do about this? Nothing. They throw out the odd suspension here and there to teams that aren't that important or not that high in the standings or to the odd player that makes league minimum salaries and mean less to their team then the equipment guy, but as soon as a star player does anything remotely serious it is swept under the rug.

I wasn't looking for Chara to be gone for the rest of the season and the playoffs, it would have been nice since MaxPac is gone for the season and possibly next depending on how his rehab goes, but I thought the NHL would at least suspend the guy for a couple games due to the fact that his arm and hand drove Max's face into the turnbuckle.

Then today they suspend Kubina for 3 games for giving a guy an elbow to the head, I agree they should have. In fact anytime any player targets another players head (Chara did) he should get at least three games. The NHL, however cannot consistently ever get that right. Look at Crosby (who I really dislike ass a player) he gets targeted twice in two games and hit in the head and has not played a game in two months. Both of those hits should have been suspended. They targeted Crosby and may not have hit him with an elbow but still hit the head with a should pad that is hard plastic body armour that is more or less like hitting a guy with a brick.

To top that off, the NHL gets a letter from a sponsor saying that they will withdraw their sponsorship of the NHL if it can't clean up the league. Instead of taking it under advisement, worrying about losing money, or just acknowledging that something has to be done, Bettman comes out and says thanks for all the money Air Canada but if you don't like this sport you can take your money and leave. So not only does the NHL not care about it's players safety, enforcing rules or looking at dangerous equipment but it doesn't even care about it's sponsors concerns.

You think to yourself, no worries, the NHL and owners only care about their own pockets. The players have the NHLPA that are there to protect the players and make sure that the NHL keeps safety and players concerns in the forefront of the NHL but instead of taking this seriously they are looking at the turnbuckle and saying that is the issue not the players out hurting each other.

So where does this leave the fans? Well we can petition the NHL to clean up it's act but if they won't listen to their sponsors they aren't going to listen to the fans. We could go to the NHL's big sponsors and have more of them put the hurt on the NHL, eventually they have to listen to that right? Or finally we can write lets to our team owners and get them to take action by removing Bettman, Campbell and all their cronies from the NHL and hope that new blood will correct the mistakes of old. What really needs to happen is for the owners, the NHL and the NHLPA to stop dragging their feet and get serious about change. Change the equipment so players don't get hurt by that, change the attitude of the players by suspending a guy for a year if he targets the head no matter who he is and finally get players to take responsibility for their actions on the ice.

Will it ever change, I don't really know but this year has been one of the worst years I have seen for injuries, bad hits, bad calls by refs and even worse calls by the NHL. Make your voice heard where it will make the most effect, contact your team owners and unfollow the NHL on Twitter and Facebook and finally don't buy anything that the money goes to the NHL. Eventually they may wake up and hear the complaints.