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It was my first thought seconds after seeing the replay. "Oh, for Christ sake, here they come again". And I was right. Marc Savard had no sooner come to rest from his unfortunate (and yes, plainly dirty...but more on that later) helicopter ride courtesy of Matt Cooke that the predictable, and oh so tiresome hue and cry went up from the bloviating hordes. Suspend him! Fine him! Fine the coach! Fine the team! Ban him! Fine him, THEN ban him! Then fold the team! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?!
And almost immediately, the usual suspects step neatly upon their usual soapboxes, each on their usual sides of the usual line in the sand to start yelling at each other. "You're a barbarian!" "Oh yeah?? Well Mike Milbury says you're a pussy! At least I think he does! But he would! If he wasn't a brain dead moron! And he'd be RIGHT!" and so on, until all sense of perspective is lost in spittle flying invective. 'Twas ever thus, and ever thus t'will be.
Suggestions abound on how to "fix" the problem of indiscriminate head hunting. Some good (Hey ref! Just call the damn game like you're supposed to!), some stupidly over reactive (all the better to sell newspapers, right Cam?), some startling in their "holy crap, never thought of that before" degree of perception, and some utterly ridiculous. And all absolutely wrong.
Everything I've heard so far deals only with the rules around where on the body contact is first made, or what constitutes a clean hit. All very interesting in a navel gazing academic kind of way but about as effective as The Bryan's speech therapist. The easiest, quickest and most effective way to eliminate indiscriminate head shots? Eliminate the "indiscriminate" part.
Eliminate the instigator rule.
For the record, Cooke's hit on Savard sickens me, as do all blatantly cheap shots (and before some sputtering yob calls me out on Neiler vs. John Mitchell's glass jaw on Saturday night...Mitchell could see it coming and still chose to make the play. Admirable, if stupid. Savard? Not so much. It's all about the blindside). And as we all know, this wasn't the first time.
But what if, in that split second when he saw the back of Savard's oh so inviting head just sitting there like a ripe melon, Matt Cooke knew, without a scintilla of doubt, that should he continue in his chosen course of action retribution would come swiftly and with potentially face crippling severity? What if that were a dead certainty? Would he still make that hit? Would you?
And this doesn't apply simply to head shots. How nice would it be to be rid of slew foots or spears or career threatening cross checks two feet off the boards? Chris Kelly and Patrice Bergeron both think that would be splendid.
Knee-on-knee? We can only dream of a world in which Bryan Marchment never plays an NHL game but through some kind of Karmic justice, is forced to make his living repairing typewriters while spending his Saturday nights fending off knife wielding she-males lookin' for some lovin' (and a little crack) in a Scarborough strip mall.
And all it would take is a minor revision to the rule book.
Much has been made about how players "just don't respect each other anymore", as if in days of yore, there existed a golden age of hockey where opponents acted not out of naked self interest, but in some nebulous Pollyanna spirit of the game, doffing their leather helmets while offering hearty hip-hip-hoorays to their worthy opponents. Total and utter bullshit. They're being paid to play a game, and they will do everything and anything to ensure they stay in the league and continue to get paid to play that game. "Respect" has never, and will never have anything to do with it.
But they do know pain and how to avoid it.
I think Marc Savard would agree, it's the easiest thing in the world to fix. So why doesn't the league?
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