Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Morgan Rielly laid the proverbial wood to the Ottawa Senators’ Ridly Greig’s head for having the cheek to drill a puck into the Maple Leafs’ empty net with a slap shot to seal a 5-3 win for his team on Feb. 10 in Ottawa. Rielly’s cross-check was the NHL’s revenge culture on full display. That culture is abhorrent, and it needs to be canceled.
Now, I can hear the condescending questions already from apologists for Rielly’s actions, asking whether I’ve ever played hockey. So yes, I’ve played the game – the full contact variety. In fact, at 65 years old, I’m still lacing up my blades, although due to my dotage, I play the game without bodychecking or cross-checking to the head.
So, hear me out as to why I believe the NHL must get serious about ridding itself of its revenge culture.
The Harm Done by Hockey’s Revenge Culture
When I use the term revenge culture, I’m not talking about a retaliatory hit, slash or punch delivered in the heat of the moment without much thought. What I’m talking about is a deliberate attempt to injure another player for a real or perceived transgression well after it occurred. It’s an act of retribution done with malice aforethought — planned in advance and carried out without concern for the potential to harm another player.
While hockey sees less of it these days, vengeance culture sullies what is a magnificent game. It makes it hard to grow the sport and tarnishes its reputation. The game is made to look like roller derby on ice, and that hurts the pride of those who love the game. It deserves better.
How Bad is Hockey’s Culture of Revenge?
Revenge culture goes back a long way in hockey. It’s part of “The Code” – a body of commandments that can never be fully known, peculiar to the Canadian variety of hockey. I say peculiar to Canadian hockey because when The Code evolved, only Canadians played the game. Yet that is not to say that all or even most Canadians — a nationality I proudly claim as my own — subscribe to it any longer.
The Code demands an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth on the ice. It finds no better illustration than the Bertuzzi-Moore incident that took place in a Mar. 8, 2004, game between the Colorado Avalanche and the Vancouver Canucks in what was then Vancouver’s General Motors Place.
The Canucks’ 6-foot-4, 236-pound colossus Todd Bertuzzi sucker-punched Colorado’s Steve Moore from behind in retaliation for the 26-year-old’s hit on the Canucks’ captain Markus Naslund in a game the month before. While the hit on Naslund wasn’t penalized, it kept the Canucks’ leading scorer out of the lineup for three games with a concussion.
Bertuzzi followed up his gutless punch by pile-driving Moore into the ice, fracturing three vertebrae in his neck, damaging vertebral ligaments, stretching the brachial plexus nerves and causing facial lacerations, a grade-three concussion and amnesia. Moore never played in the NHL again. Bertuzzi’s act of vengeance ended Moore’s hockey career after just 69 games over three seasons.
While Bertuzzi was the instrument of the Canucks’ vengeance, what he did was sanctioned and encouraged by the Canucks head coach Mark Crawford and president and general manager Brian Burke. Crawford publicly criticized two NHL referees for not calling a penalty on Moore’s hit on Naslund. Burke, who ironically in the mid-90s had been the NHL’s executive vice president and director of hockey operations, a role that put him in charge of league discipline, described Moore’s hit on Naslund as “a marginal player going after a superstar with a headhunting hit.” Canucks forward Brad May issued a “bounty” on Moore, and Bertuzzi called him “a piece of sh*t.”
I know of no other sport where this type of call for vengeance would be tolerated. It’s true that now, words like these are rarely uttered in the open by people in leadership positions in the NHL. Even so, does anyone really believe that the attitudes that seed them do not still exist in the game? Ask the Ontario Hockey League (OHL), who have just announced that they are investigating the Sudbury Wolves regarding accusations that a bounty was placed on an opposing player.
You don’t have to go back 20 years to find examples of vengeance culture in the NHL. While Rielly’s attack on Greig is the most recent example, the Minnesota Wild’s Ryan Hartman deliberately drove his stick into the Winnipeg Jets’ Cole Perfetti’s teeth on a faceoff in a 2023 New Year’s Eve game. In doing so, he apparently wanted to “send a message.”
And what was that message, you ask? It was that the Wild would not tolerate the Jets’ Brenden Dillon cross-checking Wild star Kirill Kaprizov the way he had in a game a day earlier. Never mind that Perfetti had nothing to do with the crosscheck. Hartman’s memo read that if you injure our stars, we’ll injure yours.
While Hartman was not penalized on the play, he was later fined over $4,000 for what the league deemed a high-stick not resulting in an injury or game misconduct. Perfetti didn’t say whether that was at least some consolation for the stitches he took on the play. But he did point out that Hartman told him in advance that he was going to intentionally high-stick him for Dillon injuring Kaprizov.
This season, the Senators seem to be on the receiving end of the NHL’s proclivity for exacting vengeance. Just ask Sens defenceman Artem Zub, who the Detroit Red Wings’ David Perron cross-checked in the head in a Dec. 9, 2023, game in Ottawa. Perron was retaliating for what he thought was Mathieu Joseph and Parker Kelly deliberately hitting Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin and knocking him unconscious.
Any fair evaluation of the play shows that Kelly and Joseph had anything but deliberately injuring Larkin on their minds. The referees saw it that way, too, initially assessing Joseph a five-minute major, but then changing their call to roughing on both Kelly and Joseph.
I can understand Perron going after either Kelly or Joseph, or even both in the immediate aftermath of their collision with Larkin. Yet, deliberately hitting another Senator in the head, one who had nothing to do with the injury to Larkin, using the graphite shaft of his stick as a weapon is beyond the pale. Apparently, the NHL’s Department of Player Safety thought so, too, and gave Perron a six-game suspension for his trouble.
The NHL Needs to Do Something About its Culture of Revenge
The NHL has lived with its revenge culture for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it should. The NHL is now essentially an American league run by Americans for an American audience. And guess what? Very few Americans like seeing goons wreaking vengeance in the sports they watch. For them, victory on the scoreboard is all the revenge they like to see.
Very few Americans or Europeans know anything of The Code that in days gone by once governed much of Canadian hockey and, unfortunately to this day, sullies its reputation. This is despite the fact that Canada has led the way in taking gratuitous violence out of the game and protecting its players.
And even if American and European fans knew of The Code, it wouldn’t interest them. Americans, like most Canadians, want to see speed, skill and finesse in their hockey. So, too, do Europeans. It’s why none of the NHL’s revenge ethos is seen in Olympic hockey.
And what poppycock The Code truly is. It purports to extol honour and bravery, calling for players to “set the tone” and “send a message” to the other side through tough physical play. Yet, if that doesn’t work, then it’s fine to resort to dirty play and sheer brutality. It’s “old-time hockey” as played by the Hanson brothers in the movie Slap Shot. I love the movie as much as anyone else, but it’s no longer reality.
The Canadian game, for so long influenced by the noble Code, has been eclipsed by the American and European versions of hockey. Now, only 295 of the NHL’s 707 players are Canadian, and many of them came to the league not through the Canadian Hockey League (CHL) but through the NCAA, the United States Hockey League (USHL), as well as European leagues. In fact, in 2023, only 36 percent of players drafted by the NHL came from the CHL with its three junior leagues in Canada.
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If the NHL wants to grow the market for its product in the USA, Europe, and even in its Canadian homeland, it needs to stamp out its long tradition of allowing players to settle scores long after the fact by trying to deliberately inflict injury on their opponents. It has the choice of selling hockey as the glorious game that it truly is when played the way it was meant to be played, or it can continue in the vein of Don Cherry’s “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em” videos.
But Will the NHL Do Anything About Revenge Culture?
What’s telling about the NHL’s attitude toward the problem are comments by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman in explaining why he upheld Rielly’s six-game suspension for attacking Greig. He explained that Rielly had enough time to think about dealing with Grieg differently, “with a push or a shove or even by dropping his gloves to fight.” Had he done so, “there likely would have been no need for supplemental discipline,” Bettman wrote.
Let me get this straight. After Bettman explained that “Rielly used his stick as a weapon to deliver the kind of blow to the head that the league has repeatedly made clear will not be tolerated,” he thinks it would have been just fine for him to beat on Greig’s head with clenched fists. It seems the NHL is OK with retribution for violations of rules that aren’t even on the books, as long as any ensuing blows to the head aren’t administered with a graphite stick.
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Oh, I get it. Greig had embarrassed the Maple Leafs by using a slapshot to score an empty net goal. So here’s a novel idea – instead of seeking revenge, what about not getting scored on in the first place? Or, at the very least, not getting caught so far up ice that Greig had the time to wind up and take a slap shot?
What’s particularly curious about Bettman’s remarks is that as NHL commissioner and as an American, he knows very well that much of his league’s audience, especially in the US, doesn’t want to see players “dropping their gloves to fight.” It’s as if he’s one of the very few Americans who buys into The Code.
Bettman ought to know that athletes in other sports celebrate goals, and sometimes, it hurts the feelings of their opponents because of the way they did it. Who could forget the Toronto Blue Jays’ Jose Bautista flipping a bat during Game 5 of the 2015 American League Division Series against the Texas Rangers after hitting a go-ahead three-run home run. He was criticized for it but didn’t have to worry about getting his head pummelled by any members of the Rangers for having embarrassed their pitcher.
Players who score touchdowns in the NFL don’t get assaulted by opposing players when they celebrate the six points they scored by spiking the ball as they cross into the end zone. Often that’s followed up by a flashy celebratory dance. I’m sure members of the opposing team aren’t pleased, and more than a few may be angry. Yet, none lose control of themselves and commit an assault on said scorer of a touchdown.
It’s not simply some of the NHL brass that doesn’t seem to grasp how ridiculous the league and its players are made to look by acts of vengeance. The media has the same problem.
Take TSN’s analyst Jamal Mayers, for example. He tried to justify Hartman’s high-stick on Perfetti, explaining to co-panelist Jennifer Botterill that “Hartman is sending a message that you’re not going to go after our star players. I think he sent the right message. I know the game has changed. But there’s still an element of fear.”
Proving himself to be somewhat less permissive than his sidekick Mayer on when revenge may be sought, Sam Cosentino said that while “some sort of revenge had to be exacted” for the hit on Kaprizov, the target shouldn’t have been Perfetti. Rather, it should have been one of the Jets’ bigger stars! Surely, he must see where his logic leads. Does he really believe that teams looking for revenge to be “exacted” on the Edmonton Oilers, even with good reason by his standards, could be excused for targeting Connor McDavid?
Botterill, a Harvard graduate and three-time Olympic gold medalist with Team Canada’s women’s hockey team, would have none of this. She ripped into both asking, “Both the terms you guys use, ‘revenge and sending a message’ — you watch the play, you see Perfetti, a young, great player in our league, and that’s (the high-stick) what you want to present your young players with? That it’s OK if I two-hand a player as hard as I can? I don’t think that’s what’s selling your game, for your biggest stars, your skilled players. So (you’re telling them) that if you’re a young player, be ready, because this can happen to you at any point!” While Mayer and Cosentino characterized what Hartman did as “tough and physical,” Botterill dismissed it as “cheap, gutless and dirty.”
Of her exchange with Mayer and Cosentino, she later told Ian Hanomansing of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) that “some of the terms that were brought up in our conversation – whether it was ‘fear, revenge or retaliation’, I don’t believe that should be a part of the game, or that it needs to be part of the game. If you look at some of the best talent in the game today, and the skill and the speed that we are seeing on a nightly basis in professional hockey, I don’t think that should be a necessary part of the game to sell it to the fans. And in terms of the highlights that they (the fans) want to see, I feel it’s those skilled plays that are the most exciting part of the game.”
NHL’s Revenge Culture is Bad for Business
It’s bad for the NHL’s business when its players, especially its young stars are targeted in acts of revenge. The culture that leads to it needs to be extinguished, and the league has it within its power to see that it is.
Fighting is on the way out in hockey because the NHL eventually came to understand that fewer fans wanted to see in their hockey entertainment. The league suspended the Senators’ Shane Pinto for unspecified “activities relating to sports wagering” for 41 games. I’d be willing to bet that it will be a very long time before we hear of another NHLer involved in breaking the league’s rules on gambling. The NHL has come down hard on doping just as most other sports leagues have. When was the last time you read about a doping scandal in the NHL?
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To wipe out revenge culture, it may take more severe penalties – certainly suspensions far beyond the six games Rieilly received. Yet, it can be achieved if the NHL decides it no longer wants to see its product sold as a violent blood sport.