With the goons gone the way of the dinosaurs, it’s up to the league to ensure that there is a strong enough disincentive to stop this mayhem.Įvery game in these playoffs ends the same way. Which didn’t stop them from attacking stars. Then that got silly because it was just a bunch of goons fighting each other. You know … instead of enforcing actual rules to protect stars. Until recently, teams loaded up on the likes of George Parros to “protect” stars. The result is restraint fouls and, especially in the playoffs, physical attacks on the best players. But the NHL thinks I would rather watch some no-talent 4th line guy make life more difficult for Connor McDavid or Mitch Marner. Even hidebound baseball finally decided to change some rules to stimulate offence. The NBA changed rules to increase offence so their stars could shine. Football bends over backwards to protect quarterbacks and receivers. Notably, they are the only major North American sport that does this. The NHL’s history has been to make life easier for the less talented players to stop the more talented players. Why else would you put a former goon (George Parros) in charge of on-ice discipline? It believes that violence attracts more paying customers. This is the only way to explain the ludicrous one game suspension for Alex Pietrangelo for his Paul Bunyanesque attack on Leon Draisaitl. It would appear that this department’s actual function is to safeguard the players who commit deliberate attempts to injure more so than their intended targets.

Surely the players who are the targets of unmistakable attempts to injure cannot feel that they are being safeguarded by this misnamed department. The tall foreheads at the NHL must have been reading the novel “1984” when they decided to name the on-ice disciplinary arm of the NHL the Department of Player Safety. Leafs mailbag: It’s tough to make sense of the NHL’s approach to player safety, May 12

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