Debating the instigator (again)

Stu Hackel of the NY Times Slap Shot blog made a compelling case yesterday in favor of retaining the instigator rule, against the persistent hew and cry that demands its repeal.  What Puck Daddy rightly calls ”a real conversation-starter.”

So let’s add to the conversation, and put me in the “repeal” camp.

After first pointing out that potential penalties for instigating existed since the days of Original Six, Hackel’s argument essentially boils down to this:  the Philadelphia Flyers’ tactics of intimidation and mayhem in the 1970s (which brought them two Stanley Cups), wherein the Flyers’ goons would, largely unprovoked, pummel the Ned Bradens of their opponents without significant penalty consequence, mandated the rule.

And he submits that this rationale is no less prevalent today than it was in that decade:

In the midst of Flyer-madness, over the summer of 1976, the owners passed a package of five rules to curb fighting, including a new, tougher rule mandating that a game misconduct be assessed for instigation. Did it stop the stupidity? Not right away, but the combination of these measures and the three dynasties that followed, the late-’70s Canadiens, the early-80s Islanders and the mid-’80s Oilers, steered the game away from intimidation and to perhaps the game’s best era since the first expansion.

What’s that you say? The instigation rule prevents teams from protecting their best players? That’s garbage. The rule protects the best players. Get rid of it, and you put them and the game in danger. Get rid of it and run the very real risk of the ’70s madness returning, of goons and antagonists targeting the game’s stars. What would prevent it?

That is what the instigation rule is about. The rule has been tweaked over time to add clauses about players with visors who initiate fisticuffs and altering the penalties, but in essence it is designed to keep the game from getting out of control.

For the view advocating the repeal of what is now Rule 47-11, read the oft-cited and thought-provoking article written by former Washington Capitals defenseman Neil Sheehy, which article found its way into Ross Bernstein’s 2006 book, The Code: The Unwritten Rules Of Fighting And Retaliation In The NHL.

Would an elimination of any mandatory penalty for instigating, instead rolling the rule back to those Original Six (or “Second Six”) days when a minor or major penalty was solely at the referee’s discretion, automatically return us to the Slap Shot era?  I don’t believe so and, further, the repeal may help to combat a growing danger greater than a return of the Broad Street Bullies.

The game is much different now, thirty years later, in two significant respects.

First, 90 percent or greater of all NHLers were Canadian until nearly the end of the decade, when that figure dropped just below 90%.  And Americans made up almost all of the remainder.  The percentage of European-born and raised players did not reach double digits until 1989-90.  Last season, Europeans made up almost 26% of NHL talent.

What does that mean?  An influx of “east-west” passing and stickhandling, honed on a wider ice surface, and a detachment from that sub-culture of North American hockey nurtured by the unbridled Flyers-era violence.  Not as many goons, not as many brawls in Europe or Russia, that’s for sure.  So the make up of the roster, the room, the lines on the ice, has changed dramatically since the mid-1970s.  The “North American” game has adapted to incorporate, daresay require, this type of skill and player in significant measure, in order to compete for the Stanley Cup.

Second, the sheer size of players overall has increased substantially in the last three decades, in terms of weight, height, and body-mass index, due to a combination of training and conditioning, but also to the trend of drafting the larger kid available in June.  The average weight of an NHLer these days is 210 lbs.  At the end of the 1970s, that average weight was 188 lbs.

So the increased size and conditioning of players obviously leads to more forceful, dangerous impacts at higher speeds.   Not to mention that the implication of drafting bigger and bigger kids is that those kids will be groomed to play in an environment where on-ice collisions are more often than not intended to flatten an opponent, rather than simply knock him off of the puck.

Many “routine” open ice collisions today can cause serious injury where the same collision years ago would not necessarily give the recipient a concussion.  At least I would suspect this to be the case, and the only way in which I can think to quantify it is that the rate of concussions has been increasing alongside the size of players.

To attempt to instill the instigator debate then, we have, on one hand, an argument that goes something like “thuggery will ensue as a result of a repeal of mandatory instigator penalties, because goons will take liberties against skilled players who are not inclined to fight, intimidating, pummeling, and possibly injuring those reluctant combatants without consequence, returning the game to a Slap Shot-esque circus show,” versus the argument for repeal that goes “a player should be permitted to engage an opponent who just took a run at a teammate, and possibly injured him, without more than the customary penalties for fighting, and, further, such permission will curb the sort of ‘disrespectful,’ ‘gutless’ acts on the ice of which veterans of the game complain.”

Repealing the rule will serve the latter argument much more than it will threaten a return to a state of game feared by proponents of the former argument.

Say a GM, post-repeal, decides to load up his roster with lead-footed punchers, in the hopes of mauling the opposition’s finesse players, and literally beating them into submission.  The opponents will have a lopsided level of skill and speed, both with European and non-European players, and literally skate circles around them, dominating the scoreboard.  There is simply too much skill and skating speed in required in the game today to use too many roster spots for pure pugilists.

And the referees could still call minor penalties, in their discretion, for instigating fights, awarding the other team a power play, which would further showcase the lopsided skill level.  Last I checked, a team still needs to score to win.

Maybe a repeal would trend even more heavily toward a new breed of “policeman” who can skate well, forecheck like nobody’s business, pot the odd ugly, but momentum-changing goal, and still throw the mitts with the best of ‘em (think, Matt Bradley, for one example).  That would be a wonderful development.

AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Or better yet, look at a guy like Oskar Osala, a burly winger (6′4″, 217) who can hit hard, and score plenty (13 so far in his rookie season in the A with the Bears), and even dropped the gloves in the “rookie game” at Kettler back in September of this year.  That’s the kind of player we love.

On the flip side, leaving the instigator rule as it stands today still permits an opponent to lay out a skilled player, perhaps indefinitely, due to the speed and force of the impact of today’s players.  Not to mention those hits from behind along the boards which simply won’t go away.  Stick up for your teammate then, and you can hit the showers afterward, while the offender plays on.

Are some of these crushing, career-threatening hits legal?  Yes.  Does that mean that they shouldn’t be policed by those on the opposing team best equipped to administer frontier justice?  I don’t think so.  How many fights are precipitated by an action judged illegal on the ice?  Certainly not a majority; perhaps very few.  It’s not illegal for an attacking forward to get up in a goalie’s grill after the whistle, yet invariably that act leads to the “scrum in front” and, sometimes, fisticuffs.  Why shouldn’t the same apply to curbing unmitigated leveling of your teammates who suffer “clean” hits, when those hits are so much more dangerous now than in decades past?

Some might argue that the league could curtail hits to the head if only it punished them by suspensions and fines made consistently and severely.  But in many cases, we’re talking about “clean” hits, hits that make up part of the very essence of the game.  Or at least the appropriateness is difficult to discern.  Look how much debate ensued over whether Doug Weight’s hit on Brandon Sutter was legal or not?  But it’s not difficult to discern that Sutter suffered a concussion and missed eight games.  And might now be more susceptible to another concussion in the future.

Perhaps this is why more players are attacking opponents for meting out “clean” hits, because they see more and more teammates have their livelihood threatened by a crushing hit, and its human nature to want to avenge that action against a teammate.  Perhaps that’s a slightly different topic for another time.

So, on balance, for as long as fighting is permitted in the game, a player should be permitted to defend a teammate who suffered a shot to the head or is cut down while in a prone position, without sitting in the box for an entire period as a result.  It’s possible that those “disrespectful” and “gutless” hits, from hulking figures, may become just a little less frequent.

While the concern, with the elimination of mandatory instigator penalties, of a return of the Broad Street Bullies sounds legitimate, I submit that its largely unfounded, given the profound changes in the game since the 1970s.

Thoughts?