Tuesday night at the Avalon Theater I listened to Yvon Labre persuasively make the case that hockey’s once sordid past with respect to player violence had been replaced by an era of enlightenment. There is I think powerful evidence in support of that position: two- and three-hundred-penalty-minute games are long gone; roster spots for the skating and shooting challenged but the thick of fist are too coveted to toss away; ‘Slapshot’-like scenes of players invading the stands for brawls are mercifully found only in old movies, and YouTube.
Still, something profoundly disquieting on the violence front in the contemporary game remains, insomuch as a Chris Simon is allowed to remain in the league.
The NHL career of Chris Simon is as enigmatic as it is inexplicable. Just how has the slow-footed, oft-injured scorer of a middling sum of goals, and for most of this decade, modest penalty minute totals — he’s failed to reach even 100 PIMs the past three seasons – remained in the league since 1992?
The answer, I’d allege, is found in the NHL’s bi-polar relationship with violence.
Simon will not score a clutch goal for you — he hardly ever has in his career. He has, at best, passable skills for the big league. He will no longer throw down with the game’s heavyweights – shoulder surgeries prevent that bravado. He is never singled out by coaches or management for iconic leadership traits. Instead, he seems to offer a lone but most distinguishing trait to the league’s teams ever lining up to offer him one- and two-year pacts: international headline grabbing combustibility.
This week Simon was suspended for the eighth time in his career. And it is the nature and severity of his suspension trajectory in recent seasons that is what is so outlandishly intolerable about him. Earlier this week, Simon received a match penalty for attempt to injure when, in wholly premeditated fashion, he attacked Pittsburgh’s Jarkko Ruutu. With his skate.
This act of savagery occurred less than 50 regular season games removed from his quasi bludgeoning of New York Ranger Ryan Hollweg in the face. For which he received another match penalty for attempt to injure. The DA on Long Island considered presecuting Simon for that. This week we know he should have.
The disciplinary regime of the NHL has long been a source of illogicality to me. Dale Hunter loses his cool, in a decisive playoff game, shoulder-checking Pierre Turgeon into the boards — a hit, incidentally, that Flyers’ bench boss John Stevens would have regarded as soft – and he is massacred by the league. Simon, year after year, skates with a chainsaw on his shifts, subsequently issues an agent-drafted utterance of apology and regret, and receives a series of the same sentences. Or less. And I haven’t space enough to begin a discussion of how the league has handled the Flyers this season.
After this week’s Chris Simon mayhem, one wonders, what exactly will it take for the league to say, ‘We might be able to survive without Simon’?
So this file is partly about one man’s mysterious serial-killer-like short fuse but also an enabler culture at the very top of the league within which he is compensated.
It’s somewhat ironic to ponder that Simon’s diabolical acts have occurred in the new, free-flowing NHL, when obstruction and neutral zone marauding has diminished appreciably and general managers have embraced smaller, fleeter skaters. Simon sticks out like a leisure suit at Clyde’s on New Year’s Eve. But this just reinforces my theory about the league meeting grotesque violence under mistletoe: It may ever be the case that in big-league hockey the bastard bully will have a home.
But be a non-Flyers third-liner of no name recognition and get your stick up high on a Tuesday night in Alberta, and Colin Campbell will send you to the electric chair.
It’s called incoherence, and credibility maiming, and it’s no wonder mainstream America can’t make sense of it.
It’s a wholly separate discussion, what must be the pernicious effects this must have for hockey’s gaining a seat at the high-profile media table. But that’s less important than understanding that no business organization operating in a society of some semblance of civility can tolerate a Chris Simon in its employ.
Hockey as we its purists most love it has no need for the likes of Chris Simon. Who would miss him? It is possible to embrace both the wizardry of an Alexander Ovechkin and the code-honoring brutality of a Donald Brashear sharing a sheet of ice. But explain to me, please, how it is that Chris Simon has any claim to that sheet.
He profanes it.
Thirty minutes before faceoff, the Isles’ blueline tonight apparently will consist of: Radek Martinek - Freddie Meyer; Marc-Andre Bergeron - Bryan Berard; and Aaron Johnson - Drew Fata (Rico relation, yes). Those very inexperienced final two may be partnered with more veteran blueliners, or Coach Ted Nolan may up to seriously limit their minutes and try and go with just two defense pairings as long as possible.
