ShareThisThe National Hockey League's efforts to put at least some curbs on fighting and hits to the head could disappear in a nasty partisan brawl come June.
By the end of this week's annual general managers' meetings, it emerged that two proposals on both issues will be put forward to the competition committee for the next step in adding them to the rule book. The committee will examine them and then pass any it approves along to the league governors for what is usually their rubber stamp. Then it becomes NHL law for next season.
The committee itself is not a rubber stamp and the GMs' proposed rule changes have been rejected in the past. However, this is the first time since the committee was established during the 2004-05 lockout that important measures could die because of the kind of partisan bickering usually seen on these issues.
On the first day of the GMs meetings, NHL Players' Association executive director Paul Kelly and Glenn Healy, the union's director of player affairs, were invited to give a presentation. They gave the GMs a proposed rule change from the players that called for a sliding scale of penalties, from a minor to a match penalty, for flagrant, blind-side shots to the head that are now considered legal.
The GMs nodded politely, said next to nothing and then dismissed the players' idea. Off the record, a few GMs were less polite.
Essentially, the GMs said the union suggestion was not needed because such hits are already punished through supplemental discipline -- the suspensions handed out by NHL director of hockey operations Colin Campbell. There was also the suggestion the proposal is simply another interpretation of an existing rule so there is no need to pass it.
Kelly shot back that supplemental discipline has been around for years and headshots have not disappeared. Quite the contrary.
One day later, the GMs said they will recommend to the competition committee that players participating in "staged fights" receive a 10-minute misconduct in addition to fighting majors. These are the fights that generally occur at a face-off when one enforcer challenges another.
The league said 21.6 percent of the first 500 fights this season occurred at face-offs. The implication was that increased sanctions will eliminate those fights and decrease fighting as a whole in the face of increasing pressure to do something following the death of amateur player Don Sanderson as the result of a fight.
When he was asked for his reaction to the GMs' proposal, Kelly replied in an e-mail message that, "I need to discuss the GMs' recommendations on fighting with our competition committee. I do not yet have a sense as to how the players on the committee will react."
For those of us wont to examine the tealeaves, this was an interesting response.
There are 10 members of the competition committee. It is evenly split between players and management. Five are players recently elected by the NHLPA -- Mathieu Schneider, Ryan Miller, Jason Spezza, Brian Campbell and Jeff Halpern. The other five are Philadelphia Flyers governor Ed Snider and four GMs -- Don Waddell, Bob Gainey, Kevin Lowe and David Poile. Lowe may be replaced because he gave up his GM post when he was promoted to president by the Edmonton Oilers but his replacement will be another GM.
For a proposal to pass, it needs seven votes. That means the GMs need the players to buy into their ideas or there isn't much chance of it passing.
Ottawa Senators GM Bryan Murray, GM of the Ottawa Senators, said he hopes all concerned do the right thing.
"I think both parties are concerned about the players and the health of the game," he said. "I think we'll come to the right decision about that."
However, a few of his peers think that when the players' proposal on head shots was brushed aside by the GMs this week, it lost any chance of approval from the competition committee. Given the mathematics of approval, this could result in a tit-for-tat response from the five players.
At this point, the only sure thing is a recommendation a player be allowed to receive five instigator penalties in a season before he is automatically suspended for two games. The current standard is three, although both the union and the GMs want it raised to five.
If that is all that gets passed because of partisan politics, imagine the response from the anti-fighting forces.
(Contact David Shoalts at dshoalts <at>globeandmail.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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