NHL Rule 48.1 on head contact is too cute by half; this post brought to you by the letters CTE
Of course the first round could not conclude without a hell of a tell about the NHL's dedication to the Lost Cause of denying the science of brain injury. And it's time for a Round 2 vibe check!
Part of the problem, and pardon the puck pedantry, with explaining why the blow Jacob Trouba laid on Timo Meier is longer a hockey play, is the lingo of the game itself.
Or put it this way: if you remember when physical contact in hockey was called bodychecking rather than hitting, you might be An Old. Hit works better in hockey shorthanded. The hit even became an official statistic sometime in the 1990s when the National Hockey League was trying to appeal to American audiences by using basketball and football terminology.1 But it should be called bodychecking. By definition, a player uses their body to disrupt or impede a puck carrier and change the flow of play.
The game is the flow, not blows to the head such as the one to Meier that came courtesy of Trouba in the third period of the New York-New Jersey Game 7. We know the science. Those collisions that “rattle the hell out of our human Jello brains… (are) not good for the jiggly thought bits,”2 full stop. Flow-wise, Meier was coming over the New York blueline solo in the midst of four opponents, so there was “(zero) reason for hitting a guy about to skate into quadruple coverage.”
Those two threads intertwine with two others to show how the NHL, lip service notwithstanding, seems dedicated to Lost Cause of keeping ‘our game’ inclusive for traumatic brain injuries and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). One was a strain of Technically It’s Legal Apologism. The other came on 22 April when Commissioner Gary Bettman went on NPR Morning Edition and did his best Nathan Thurm to run interference for general managers and governors who have the power to curb blows to the head to reduce the possibility of another Steve Montador, or Joe Murphy.
This forum, to be frank, is about how sports fans who read should relate to what they consume. Why should we be the ones who have to apologize for having something of a conscience while averring “withdrawal in disgust is not the same apathy”? Part of that is I don’t really bother with what the media experts say. Hard pass on any postgame panels’ potential use of pretzel logic by people whose employment is subject to NHL approval.
In the ensuing debate among the Extremely Online who have not bailed on MelonUsk’s digital hellscape, the indispensable Scouting The Refs Twitter account made a post that had a valid point about why Trouba was not penalized. It pointed out the exceptions to Rule 48.1 — Illegal Check To The Head that arguably made the play legal in an NHL game — if not any other strata of elite hockey. It noted, “Head contact may be permitted if unavoidable or if player's body position contributed to the contact — which, with Meier bent over, leaning forward, did on this play.”
Fair enough, even if one is cynical enough to note Trouba’s team was trailing by two goals in the third period of a winner-take-all Game 7, and teams are almost never put at a player disadvantage with that time-and-score situation.
Most of the quote tweets, quite sensibly, seemed to point out that something being technically legal does not mean it is healthful or safe. It often means it is just seen as good for business. And why it was arguably legal is a huge tell when it comes to the science denialism that the NHL, where there is reason to believe the general managers will never use their power to “make all head contact illegal,” which is the standard of care in the international game and the beginner-pro Canadian Hockey League.
But then one starts to go semi-Oliver Stone about the “bent over, leaning forward.” Hockey players should never be completely upright. You bend at the knees and stick out those hockey haunches as you stride ’n’ glide, and you have some forward lean since that object in dispute, the puck, is usually down at ice level.
The exceptions to Rule 48.1, to borrow a criticism of the criminal justice system, were adopted in 2013. It was thought it would shift the “onus (to) the hitter” — CHECKER! — “to avoid recklessness.” But oftentimes, maliciousness is not reckless; it is a learned action. And when one re-acquaints themself with the exceptions, it seems self-evident that the NHL still wants an out from having to curb blows to the head.
Clause (i) does address head-hunting but still holds space for a high bodycheck delivered with possibly bad intentions. Sure, lay the body like you mean it, but to channel something Don Cherry said decades ago, you don’t hit opponents to maim them; you just hit them to hurt… temporarily.
Clauses (ii) and (iii) shift the blame to the puck carrier. Both assuming a posture and materially changed the position of his body or head could mean just about anything in the eye of the beholder.
The NFL is actually ahead of NHL on protecting the head. Who’da thunk it?
That kind of contact, that forceful, and with the head as a principal point of contact, is an infraction in every other precinct of collision sports. It would be a 15-yard unnecessary roughness penalty if it was a defensive back hitting a pass receiver in the National Football League. But that segues into how Bettman, as flagged by the player agent Allan Walsh, denied a link between the condoned blows to the head and CTE brain disease.
“I don’t believe there has been any documented study that suggests the elements of our game result in CTE,” Bettman said in that media appearance on NPR on April 22. “There have been isolated cases of players who have played the game and have had CTE, but that doesn’t mean it necessarily came from playing in the NHL.
“What you (the host) are trying to do is equate football and hockey and the two are not comparable in terms of the amount of head contact.”
On the first point, Bettman knows he and hockey’s solons have deniability so long as CTE can only be definitely diagnosed through an autopsy. The NFL, of course, acknowledged the link between football and CTE some seven years ago, and it is trying to make the sport somewhat safer for athletes’ brains. On the second, it’s not necessarily about the amount of head contact, but the impact from collisions. Hockey players skating at over 45 km/h on ice move faster than football players on turf. So that dog does not hunt.
That is why there might actually be less of the liberal-humanist guilt about watching the NFL and NHL. Football minds are tinkerers; schemers; mad scientists. Hockey hews a little more to the that’s-how-we-have-always-done-it-you-nerd.
It is important to remember that the clarity around commodified collision and combat sports dealing in denialism around brain science did not just surface sometime in the 1990s or early ’00s. Rick Westhead of TSN, in his 2020 book Finding Murph which was explored for a SportsLit episode, traced the head-in-the-sand approach back almost a century, to the 1920s. By the 1970s, the great Earl McRae documented the health problems that Reggie Fleming was beginning to encounter after being a tough, gritty player during the helmetless era. Fleming, decades later, was the first deceased NHLer found to have CTE.
None of this knowledge is new. It has always been there, and it might boil down to ethically sourcing your sports fix the same way you might do with your coffee. How much compromise do you accept? Part of why I am almost solely a playoffs-only NHL watcher is because that is when the stakes are high enough to abide how it still cannot let go of the elements that let in the lethal blows to the head.
Timo Meier did finish the game. But as Ken Dryden noted in his book Game Change, the challenge before the NHL is to curb both the “frequency and force of blows to the head.” Since New Jersey won to advance to the second round against Carolina, Meier has another game in fewer than 48 hours — and another exposure to getting hit in the head.
It was gratifying that legal, schmegal was the prevailing sentiment on Hockey Twitter. That shows a general acceptance of the science. And we know the only thing that tops science is better peer-reviewed science, not just hoping a contagion will just up and vanish. It is too late in the rant to draw an analogy for another kind of denialism that has been spreading rampant since around March 2020, but it’s there, man.
Checking the vibes before Round 2
Pacific — Edmonton vs. Vegas
Oilers vibes: Some scintillating analysis about the (hey, stay awake!) Alberta election on May 29 shows the road to victory goes through Calgary. That might shoot down the notion it would be an assist for progressivism if the Oilers went belly-up and left Connor McDavid holding the bag yet again.
There has to be some space held for the notion that the best scorer since the salad days of Nos. 99 and 66 should get to one Stanley Cup final in his career in this diluted hard-cap league.
Golden Knights vibes: Hey, Las Vegas, what sports team are you going to steal next? It takes two to tango, and your carpetbagging city was willing to be a partner with Oakland Athletics governor John Fisher. Some of that late-capitalist stink might get on the Golden Knights.
There is no real other beef with Vegas. Defenceman Brayden McNabb is injured, so the bill cannot be presented for what he did to Joey Hishon during the 2011 Memorial Cup.
On the positive side, everything is flipped around for Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy due to what happened to his former team. He is no longer the coach who had a happy landing after the Boston Bruins moved on from him one year ago. He, based on a sample size of one blown 3-1 series lead, needed to get away from those choking dogs.
Central — Seattle vs. Dallas
Kraken vibes: The best part about the historic legacy franchises of Seattle and Florida crashing the last eight is how they did it.
Both played high-tempo games and took the fight to the foe. That shudder that just ran down your spine probably dates from the Dead Puck days when teams such as the 1996 Panthers and 2003 Ducks made deep runs by playing the 1-4 trap and relying on their goalie. So there is that.
The hockey Fates surely took a number when Jordan Eberle boarded Colorado’s Andrew Cogliano and fractured his neck. That is a pause to wonder if Seattle getting by the somewhat injury-depleted Avalanche was just laying the trap — those three Oliver Bjorkstrand shots that caught the posts and crossbar in Game 7 might have been redirected by Lucifer himself! All the clichés about ‘playing with house money’ and ‘nothing to lose’ are getting applied to Seattle. But that talk just sets off mental alarm bells that led one to cash out and go up to the room to read.
Stars vibes: First off, Dallas goalie Jake Oettinger is called Otter, and he is a bit more dynamic than his Seattle cord-cottage counterpart Philipp Grubauer. If Round 1 of the playoffs is about carnage and contenders having an outbreak of stepondickitis (hello, Boston!), then Round 2 is when some semblance of order kicks back in.
Dallas is a more playoff-hardened crew, and offensive defenceman Miro Heiskanen is the most dynamic creative talent in the series. And no Finnish player has ever captured the Conn Smythe Trophy, so one can root for that unprecedented outcome.
Also, no one is talking about the butterfly effect from something that went down in the Ontario Hockey League.
When Dallas kept 19-year-old rookie forward Wyatt Johnston in October, that left the OHL’s Windsor Spitfires in need of a big piece. Seattle returned 18-year-old lottery pick Shane Wright to the OHL. Windsor traded for Wright, and then became the first No. 1 seed to get swept 4-0 in the first round of the playoffs. Dallas should not be punished for quickly developing a draft choice, so Seattle is the only potential culprit for putting Windsor fans through a humiliation that even Kenny vs. Spenny would not contemplate.
Metro — New Jersey vs. Carolina
Devils vibes: Zero in on who and how New Jersey got the upper hand against the Rangers in the Go, Meteor! matchup of Round 1. Scoreless game, mid-second period. The Devils’ Ondrej Palat, who came through the Québec league, outworked two New York Rangers players from Boston-area college teams, Adam Fox (Harvard) and Chris Krieder (Boston College), to get the puck. Palat popped the puck over to Mikey McLeod (Mississauga, OHL), who slid in the shorthanded goal.
That is not to cast aspersions on one development track or make a case for the other. Whatever works for the individual player is best. There is still some latent Canadian nationalism that will always be straight sussin’ about the U.S.-born college guys. Palat and McLeod illustrated it with a helluva convenience sample, and that might bode well for New Jersey. Plus, how can one not root for the story with Akira Schmid, the Devils’ rookie Swiss goalie who shares a name with a classic Japanese film and was playing in the USHL just two years ago?
Hurricanes vibes: Let’s introduce into the record the first match in a unique search of the head coaches, the Devils’ Lindy Ruff and the Hurricanes’ Rod Brind’Amour.
Flashback to 2006, when Ruff was coaching the Buffalo Sabres and Brind’Amour was captain of Carolina. The Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup that spring, outlasting the Sabres and the Edmonton Oilers in back-to-back seven-game series over the final stages.
Now, during that conference final, Ruff tweaked Carolina, as coaches do, by calling them an “arrogant” team. The media, who had dressing room access instead of waiting for the players to come to the same availabilities that are then posted on YouTube, ran with that due to how Brind’Amour tried to shirk any post-game obligations after Carolina’s first loss in the Stanley Cup final.
The ’Canes lost Game 3 in Edmonton to have their series lead cut to 2-1, and Brind’Amour tried to get out of taking questions. A lot of media people who had deadlines were unable to get comments from Carolina’s captain and lone goal scorer.
Is it fair to bring that up 17 years later? Wait, “fair?” What kind of nihilist extreme-caszh hockey fan are you, anyway? I do not care that your girlfriend gave up her toe.
The ’Canes have more than one key man down. The longer-term injuries to Teuvo Teräväinen and Andrei Svechnikov sucked a lot of natural offence out of this Expected Goals Percentage Powerhouse. That could come home to roost if Schmid keeps channeling Cam Ward, circa 2006, and the Devils use their speed on the counter-attack. Let’s stop before this sounds too much like actual critical analysis.
Atlantic — Florida vs. Toronto
Panthers vibes: Florida coach Paul Maurice forever endeared himself to this athletics supporter on May 7, 2008, when he was let go in Toronto. He called in that day to the FAN 590 to talk about it and said on-air, “I’m on my way to pick up my kids so they don’t have to hear the news from the TV.”
The placement of that “the” is eternally endearing. So did what happened at his next coaching post in Carolina the first time his team came into Toronto. Maurice made some tongue-in-cheek comment to a Raleigh, N.C., radio station. The Toronto media corps began scaling that molehill up into a mountain ahead. In turn, Maurice played it off with an avuncular admonishment: “People, go home and have some tea, breathe.”
That is practically a mantra. Now follow the transitive properties from that comment, and decide whether that favours the Panthers, or Toronto.
Sufficiently riled, the Leafs beat Carolina 6-4 in that momentous mid-January 2009 matchup. Pyrrhic victory, y’all! Those Leafs managed to do just enough to finish 24th overall in ’08-09 — out of the John Tavares tank stakes race, but with a high enough draft position to select Nazem Kadri.
Tavares found his way into the blue and white eventually. Good things come to those who wait, right? The Tampa Bay Lightning, after trying to tank for Tavares, landed cornerstone D-man Victor Hedman. The current Leafs just zapped them.
Kadri was eventually traded. One gets the sense that enough time has passed since Kadri left Toronto that there is some guilt across Southern Ontario over how he wore the hair shirt for his suspensions during Leafs’ playoff disappointments.
It is unclear how the deadpan snark of Paul Maurice will tip the scales in 2023. But it is appreciated. It just sets up mentioning that Florida has more going for it than just being the low seed that removed the Boston Bruins as an obstacle to the greater glory of Leaf Nation. Thank you for that, by the way.
How you feel about them might hinge on your visceral reaction to the Panthers’ lodestar, Matthew Tkachuk. He drives offence, and he pushes the bile. But this stage of the game requires a bile-pusher. And you can’t hold his OHL London Knights imprimatur against him, since Tavares and Mitch Marner also played in London.
Throw in the coincidence that the Leafs are forever trying to capture the magic of the Doug Gilmour Spring of 1993. Panthers top-six wing Sam Bennett used to sport Dougie’s old No. 93 before dropping it for the single-digit 9; his GM in the OHL ranks was, wait for it, Doug Gilmour. The Panthers are often a leaky ship defensively but might end up being a vessel carrying the message that history does not decide these games.
Maple Leafs vibes: One right and responsibility of being registered as a conscientious objector in Leaf Nation — more of a well-wisher who wishes them no specific harm — involves having a read on the fans. Have they been good? Do they deserve nice things?
They do. There, I said it.
The seething negative energy that the Toronto-resenting rest of Canada is hurling toward the Leafs might be converted into something powerful. You saw it by some of the reactions after Tavares’ overtime goal wrapped the Leafs-Tampa Bay Lightning series. Apparently, you are a bad person for feeling elation about the end of 17 seasons of eating naught but burning hot coals and drinking naught but burning hot cola.
The culture of Leafdom might have evolved to the point where it is finally read to win. It can toggle between post-win delirium and post-defeat dip into the dank-meme arts.
That is a state of grace. Here is to hoping you took copious notes during those Peak Era Will Ferrell comedies. If they taught us nothing else, a true Team of Destiny needs to build out that certitude — take it, Amy Adams — in order to grab hold of that line between speed and chaos and wrestle it to the ground like a demon cobra. Or Panther, in this case.
That reference is apt! Nothing is more speed and chaos than playoff hockey.
For far too long, Leaf Nation has been operantly conditioned by Relentless Media Hoopla to go from 0 to 180. Now they are on to the game and have made themselves reliably bulletproof, unlike perhaps the actual hockey club’s defensive zone coverage, the coaching… and the goaltending of Ilya Samsonov on some nights.
The big six of Tavares, Marner, Auston Matthews, Ryan O’Reilly, Morgan Rielly, and William Nylander have been thriving. (Nylander, per MoneyPuck, led the Leafs in 5-on-5 expected goals during the Tampa Bay series, so consider him to be due.)
Typically, I would be the first to say Leaf Nation should be served a $29 reality sandwich from the concessions. But their attitude is right this time, for whatever that might be worth between the lines. And if it is not meant to be, then we will go home and have some tea.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Remember when every forward over six feet and 200 pounds was a “power forward”? Somewhere I still have an early 1990s Tony Granato hockey card that describes the skilled wing as a “small forward.”
Sources cited in this post: Arpon Basu, Allan Walsh, George Malik, Sebastian Jackson, ScoutingTheRefs.