Black and Blue and Red All Over
By Mike Haggett
Published March 19, 2004

Is it me, or has the last two weeks felt like a month in the NHL world? First it is the trade deadline, followed by the Ottawa / Philadelphia trip to yesteryear. Then Todd Bertuzzi’s unfortunate hit on Steve Moore, the WHA announces that it has six firm franchises for next season, and oh yeah, the drive for Lord Stanley is in high gear. For the passive home town fans, life is as simple as looking at the box score from the previous night, a glance at the standings and then to find out when the next all important match up is for the pride of the town. For those that watch all of it and try to figure out the big picture, it is enough to give one a Popsicle headache.

The trade deadline proved interesting to me. The teams that have a lot got a whole lot more. Colorado and Detroit did what they had to do to maintain their post season dominance, but both clubs are faced with injuries to key players. A total of ten teams in the West did something to help their respective clubs make a run for it. I mentioned it in my first article about the Calgary Flames making a run at it for the first time since 1996-97. The addition of Chris Simon for me made the Flames a bona fide dark horse team to watch in my book. As beat up as Detroit and Colorado are, the West is as vulnerable as ever. The East saw the long overdue fire sale in Manhattan as the New York Rangers sent ten players packing for other clubs. The Boston Bruins, much to the local delight, actually went after the big player that their fans have been screaming for years to get. With the additions of Sergei Gonchar and Michael Nylander from Washington, the faithful have something to smile about on Causeway Street. The B’s will go as far as Andrew Raycroft will carry them. Montreal is thinking Cup for the first time in eleven seasons! Will Alexi Kovalev get them there? Could the long drought for Les Habitants come to an end for their 25th Cup? The team in the East that has captured my imagination is the Ottawa Senators. With former Washington Capital Peter Bondra being sent to the Canadian Capital, he may just be the difference for Jacques Martin’s troops. And how exciting would an Ottawa / Philadelphia Flyers series be in round one? My bet is on Bobby Clarke taking a page out of the Broad Street Bullies handbook for success and jumps the glass looking for Martin.

As for the Ottawa / Philadelphia rendition of Olde Tyme Hockey, it is great seeing new rivalries form with clubs. I am a firm believer that this game grows with incidents like that. Now you have two teams that have worked up a genuine hate for one another, will be guaranteed sell outs when the two play each other for years to come, and will be entertaining to say the least. My home town QMJHL team, the Lewiston MAINEiacs had an old fashioned garage sale just after Christmas with the visiting Baie-Comeau Drakkar. The rematch was the most anticipated event to happen all season, even more so than Sidney Crosby’s visit with the Rimouski Oceanic. Nothing gets teams and fans fired up more than a good physical battle. For the people out there that don’t think fighting belongs in the game, go watch figure skating, and don’t start with me. There were more bench clearers in Major League Baseball last season than in the NHL in the past ten years. Next, please.

Alright, everyone else on the planet has chimed in on this whole Todd Bertuzzi misfortune from Dan Rather of CBS News to Woody Paige of The Denver Post to Tim Dahlberg of the Associated Press. I have three words for you, and all the other recently self-anointed hockey experts. Just. Shut. Up. Enough already. What Bertuzzi did was wrong and I am one who thinks the penalty was a bit too stiff for the crime. Sucker punches happen. Players falling on top of one another happen. Steve Moore gets knocked out cold on his feet and Bertuzzi falls on top of him, by chance breaks two vertebrae in his neck. Now we are going to discuss how brutal hockey is, and that fighting is bad, that people must be crazy to pay to watch such a barbaric and Neanderthal sport. Sure I have seen the incident a thousand times like the rest of the television serving world. My take on it was that everything happened exactly right for Moore to get knocked out and for Bertuzzi to fall on him in such away to break his neck in two places. Horrible incident, no question, but it was a freak incident. People, this stuff happens all the time. At some point during a game, someone is going to take a punch from somebody off the nut and players are going to fall on top of each other. I’ll go as so far to say if that incident was done over again, the results would be much different. Todd Bertuzzi is a good hockey player, and even though the results of his actions against Steve Moore have left him demonized in the hands of the media, I will not be fooled into thinking that this was anything less than a completely freak incident. The league reacted to the outcry of these people that no nothing about our game, and in a sense, made Bertuzzi the guy on the Wanted: Dead or Alive poster. It is baffling how the league operates, and proves yet again that the league office clearly doesn’t get it on yet another front. Fifteen games, $200,000 fine and a tearful public apology would have been good enough.

Since we’re talking about the league that can’t get anything right, is anyone paying attention to the reincarnation of the World Hockey Association? The league that shouldn’t have happened in the first place is about to happen again. Five franchises have anted up for next season so far and include Quebec City, Hamilton, Toronto, Minneapolis and “an undisclosed U.S. city” (my bet is Detroit). If the Bertuzzi black eye and the impending labor strife wasn’t bad enough, the rebirth of the league that didn’t have a chance in most NHL executives eyes thirty years ago might just surprise some people yet again. Certainly the WHA would never be the caliber of the NHL as far as talent goes, but does it have to? Many NHL venues have many people disguised as seats as it is, as the prices to watch pro hockey have skyrocketed. Without strong TV revenue, the fans (and the diehards at that) have had to eat the cost of it. This is where over expansion by the NHL in the recent past is going to come back and haunt the league in an even bigger way, maybe even more so than the impending labor problem. Maybe with everything going on in the NHL that is so wrong with it, who knows…they might actually do it right.