There Ain't No Cure for the Summer Time... Bertuzzi??
By Mike Haggett
Published July 11, 2004

So here it is… mid-July, the mercury is rising and life on a frozen pond is but a dream for another month or more. Seems though that the passionate ones are already thinking camp for their respected teams, yet the sense of doubt on the upcoming NHL season varies like a pair of youngsters on a see-saw. None the less, there is news, albeit another black eye to match the other one which is the lack of a labour agreement.

In one of my prior articles I mentioned the fact that this Todd Bertuzzi situation got blown way out of proportion in my estimation. With the police department of Vancouver pressing charges against Bertuzzi, that was more than enough to get my already warm blood boiling. I was aghast when I read about it, and even after a couple of weeks, it still gets me fired up.

Cheap shots happen in the game of hockey, and as far as I am concerned, Bertuzzi got his punishment from the league office, has paid for it both monetarily and emotionally, and now his future needs to be left to Gary Bettman on deciding when his penalty should be up. As far as I am concerned, Bertuzzi’s paid enough, but if the league wants to continue with having the player locked up in a public stockade in the centre of town, then so be it.

The league could have really ended this charade in 2000 by making more of a villain out of Marty McSorley when he two handed Donald Brashear in the head with a stick. Sure, McSorley got suspended for the rest of that season plus all of the next, paid a hefty fine and deservedly so. That was beyond bush league. The media had their day with it, and in my mind didn’t do enough to make more of an example out of it than it did. Instead, it was at the tail end of the season, the Bruins were out of the playoffs at that point and outside of the stiff penalty, nothing really came of it. Brashear was not badly hurt, and ended up playing soon after that vicious attack. McSorley also deserved to get brought up on court charges for assault with a dangerous weapon, which he received his sentence and he “paid” his debt with an 18-month conditional discharge, if you want to call it that. McSorley ended up retiring, and the ensuing media firestorm retired with him.

The NHL will go on trial again in a Vancouver courtroom, and if the previous penalty in McSorley’s case is any barometer, it will be more of a waste of city tax dollars more than anything else. The NHL’s penalty against Bertuzzi will be far more crippling than anything the Vancouver courtroom will dish out. If anything, this will pour more salt into the wound that really is how the NHL handles situations like this, and how it did a great job of making itself look real bad. Like a judge and a jury are going to make Bertuzzi pay more than he already has. Get real. I am all in favor of stick swinging incidents leading to criminal charges, make no mistake about it. But this situation warrants none of it. For those that believe otherwise, I ask you to think for a minute… when was the last time you saw a hockey game without at least one cheap shot that a player took a liberty to take? I can’t remember a game where I didn’t see one. Every match, every night, someone takes a swipe at somebody.

I am all in favor of rules, as long as they are called consistently, which is why this situation fries me to no end. The result of the action is unique in the fact that Steve Moore was seriously injured. What isn’t unique is the fact this kind of thing happens nightly. If the league is going to make an example out of Bertuzzi and demonize him, then the league also needs to take the steps and change the rules to prevent it from happening again.

So what should the league do about it this problem? Let’s grab the old Dominik Hasek wire style buckets and play the NCAA style game with no fighting if that is the case, because that is what is going to need to happen. Either that, or lets put the police paddy wagon in the Zamboni entrance and load it up while the game is going on, taking each player that throws a cheap shot (that gets caught anyway) and take them out of the game, and take them downtown to get booked once the game is over. The booking room will smell like stale coffee, cigarettes and now perspiration to give it that athletic accent. Sounds pathetic, doesn’t it… but is it? The league needs to step in and draw the line… dig a trench if you will, and make the consequences perfectly clear… you take a shot at someone, you are gone, you will get suspended, and you may end up in a courtroom. If not, these same style incidents will keep happening time and time again. Bottom line, the league will suffer more PR damage if it doesn’t do something to curtail it.

The league forces the bad PR onto itself because it seems to have made a circus out of something that really could have been avoided. If Colin Campbell’s office just released a CP or AP wire story 48 hours after the incident saying that Bertuzzi was suspended indefinitely, $200,000 fine, and life goes on, then it doesn’t have to subject itself to this kind of ridicule. Dragging it out for two weeks, holding a press conference in an atmosphere like a countries’ leader just got assassinated is completely counterproductive and does nothing to improve its image. Why on earth would you want to exploit to the world that the NHL is made up of a bunch of cold-blooded monsters that are trying to kill each other?

If fighting is to be allowed in the NHL, then the league office needs to prepare itself better for the consequences of having to deal with it, and the subsequent behavior, such as incidents like this, that goes along with that. Publicly humiliating Todd Bertuzzi accomplishes nothing more than the fact the player already feels horrible about what he did and makes the players look like a bunch of caged animals. Outrageous.