I haven’t mentioned the Bertuzzi hit in a regular post yet, so I thought I, as a hockey fan, should deal with it before the memory of it goes away. I saw the hit once, and have intentionally not seen it again, because I don’t want to see that kind of crap. I know that the sports shows will be showing it for a couple more weeks, but I’m not going to watch it - I will change the channel at the first sight of it. There are lots of sports “hilights” that I treat this way - guys breaking their legs, or whatever.

So, with that out of the way - I’d like to direct your attention to the following article by ESPN’s Jim Kelly about the root cause of the problem. He Canadian hockey, as if it were some specialty of Canadian kids. Certainly, all of his stats point in that direction, but what he misses is the reason that Canadians are the goons in the NHL. It’s not because only Canadians have violent hockey tendancies, it’s because it doesn’t take as much skill to “make it” in the NHL as a goon.

The major feeding pools for NHL talent are the CHL (WHL, QMJHL and OHL) and increasingly US College hockey. I don’t know about the other parts of the CHL, but I know that the WHL has a limit on the number of European kids that can be on each team - and it’s quite low. Why on earth would a WHL team waste their European roster spot on a goon? It doesn’t make any sense at all. Goons are a dime a dozen, it’s skill that’s hard to come by - so the European roster spots are taken up by skill players. Don’t try to tell me that there is no goonery in Europe, or the US collegiate hockey. Yes, I know, there’s no fighting in College hockey. That’s why you don’t see a bunch of American goons either.

So, yes, it’s fixable at the CHL level, so Canadian hockey (as in the CHL) is responsible, not Canadian hockey players.

The problem is that the in-game penalties for over-agressive, overly violent behaviour are too small. You’d certainly see a lot more after the whistle crap in football if the penalties were reduced to 2 yards from 20 yards. With penalties being 2 minutes, and the refs usually “evening it up” so that neither team gets an advantage. You get the same 2 minutes for getting in a guy’s way (interference) as you do for whacking him across the wrist with your stick (slashing) It takes a pretty bad play for a five minute major to be assessed (other than two at a time with fighting.) The penalties for bad behaviour are far too small to be effective. It’s pretty clear, that it is possible to eliminate that kind of crap by making the penalties a lot more stiff - there’s no fighting in Canadian College hockey, because it’s an automatic suspension. At the same time, checking from behind is an automatic suspension too, and all that’s done is cause the refs to call it “roughing” instead, so as to not be handing out suspensions all the time.

If Moore’s initial hit had been called a penalty (it was clearly a dirty hit, even if it was strictly legal) and a suspension had resulted, Bertuzzi wouldn’t have gone headhunting.

The reason that frontier justice prevails is because the “real” justice doesn’t have any power. Look at any “old west” movie - the bands of outlaws, and lynch mobs existed because of a lack of respect for the law. All it took was having John Wayne come in and take the badge, and the bad guys started behaving, and the lynch mobs disappeared.