NHL’s lack of action on hit on Hab was disgraceful
Kotkaniemi dropped on his head and NHL’s Department of Player Safety does nothing
The play began innocently enough when Canadiens second-year Finnish centreman Jesperi Kotkaniemi, whose game was just coming together after a rough start to the season, went into the corner at the Bell Centre against Colorado’s Nikita Zadorov.
What followed was another of those moments when you want to look away from hockey and never look back again.
It was an odd-looking play — not exactly a slew foot, more like a slew knee. Zadorov approached Kotkaniemi at an angle from the back. Not at high speed; he wasn’t going to do any damage had the hit been clean.
Instead, Zadorov first lifted his right knee into the back of Kotkaniemi’s knee. It would have been less harmful had Zadorov driven Kotkaniemi straight into the glass with his shoulder. Instead, the hit turned into a kind of wrenching judo flip of the upper body, with Zadorov twisting Kotkaniemi and dropping him onto his head and neck so hard that the young Finn had no time to get a hand out to protect himself.
The fall could have been catastrophic. A fractured skull. A broken neck. Paralysis. In a swift and dangerous sport, these things are going to happen. The ice and the boards are hard, the skate blades sharp, the puck and sticks potentially lethal. There is much that simply can’t be prevented.
And there is much that is utterly unnecessary. All it takes is the will to stop it, which the NHL so conspicuously lacks. It begins on the ice, where referees François St. Laurent and Tim Chmielewski saw nothing wrong, even though one was positioned in the opposite corner with a clear view of the hit. Whistle? Penalty, maybe?
Nada. Bupkis. Fast-forward to the laughably named Department of Player Safety for more of the same. Radio silence. Not even a phone call to Zadorov and a meaningless slap-on-the-wrist fine.
The result was a brain injury for Kotkaniemi. Never mind the league’s laughable attempt to gloss it over with the insulting and mendacious “upper-body injury.” Horse manure — Kotkaniemi’s brain was injured, with consequences that might persist for a lifetime.
Before you say this is just more Montreal whining, allow me to quote Larry Brooks of the New York Post, who wrote: “Finally, Colorado’s Nikita Zadorov slew foots Montreal’s Jesperi Kotkaniemi, the Finn suffers a concussion after landing on his head, and the alleged Department of Player Safety remains mum.
“Won’t someone please change the name of that department?”
So how could Zadorov get away with it? Blame hockey’s pervasive knucklehead culture, which has survived well into the 21st century. The loudest of the braying donkeys in the barn may have been shuffled off to the Podcast Porch — but the brutal culture Don Cherry helped foster lives on.
Not so long ago, it seemed as though the Department of Player Safety was making a little headway despite constant interference from on high. If recent decisions are any indication, the backsliding has begun in earnest. The worst of it came last month when St. Louis defenceman Robert Bortuzzo, a previous offender, cross-checked Nashville forward Viktor Arvidsson in front of the Blues net while the Predators were on a power play.
The initial hit, after Arvidsson swiped at the puck from the corner of the crease, was standard issue, hard enough to knock Arvidsson into the net. The second was not: After looking at the ref as though to say “you won’t do a damn thing about it,” Bortuzzo delivered a second vicious cross-check to Arvidsson’s back while he was down and unable to defend himself.
Bortuzzo is a multiple offender. Go back to the butt-end he delivered to the face of Jamie Benn back in 2015 and you’ll see what I mean. Surely at this point, you want to come down on Bortuzzo with both skates before you have another Matt Cooke (a former NHLer who was suspended six times) on your hands.
Nope. Bortuzzo got a laughable four-game suspension, which at his level of pay cost him all of $67,000. No wonder Bortuzzo looked at the ref with contempt before he levelled the second cross-check. He knew any suspension resulting from his action would be meaningless.
How does this happen? How does the league seem to go out of its way to enable players like Bortuzzo and Zadorov while effectively penalizing the victims?
Consider this: Colin Campbell is still employed as director of Hockey Operations.
Campbell is a charter member of the old boys’ network that still runs hockey, even with Cherry put out to pasture, Bill Peters ousted for the most virulent racist remarks, Mike Babcock fired and disgraced for his manipulative approach to players in his charge, and Marc Crawford under a cloud years after he and former NHL disciplinarian Brian Burke played deplorable roles in Todd Bertuzzi’s sucker-punch assault on Colorado’s Steve Moore.
The head of the Department of Player Safety, George Parros, surely knows what’s going on. That he doesn’t act more forcefully to prevent it is on the league and the old boys’ network.
It’s a disgrace. And nothing short of a player ending up a quadriplegic is likely to end it. Not while hockey’s knucklehead culture is still in the saddle.
Won’t someone please change the name of that department?