Mark Scheifele incident is more evidence that NHL has to get tougher on dirty hits
DoPS #DoPS
Brandon Carlo wandered into a meeting room at the Bruins hotel Wednesday night on Long Island and wondered why his teammates, there for a bite to eat, were all fussing around the TV.
“I didn’t know what was going on,” said the earnest fifth-year defenseman, “and then you see a hit like that.”
An ugly hit. Frightening. Cringe-worthy. With 57 seconds to go in a game that was decided (5-3 Montreal win), Winnipeg’s Mark Scheifele clobbered an unsuspecting Jake Evans a fraction of a second after the unsuspecting Canadiens forward wrapped around the net and tucked home an empty-net goal.
The brutalizing hit saw the 25-year-old Evans drop face-down on the ice and have to be stretchered off, surrounded by medical personnel. The league announced Thursday that Scheifele would have a telephone hearing to explain his actions. Players who undergo phone hearings are not subject to suspensions of more than five games.
Yep, we are here again, smack in the middle of the Stanley Cup playoffs and once more jawboning over what place such vicious, dangerous hits have in the NHL. Year after year, same ol’ discussion, again stealing the spotlight from the league and its players at the most thrilling, compelling, and entertaining time of the season.
No league steps into this muck, year after year, like the NHL.
Those hits obviously still have a place in the game because the 28-year-old Scheifele, a superb talent and normally a clean, competitive player over his 10 NHL seasons, skipped away with what amounts to a tap of of his gloved wrists.
He’ll be back after a four-game suspension, which was handed down Thursday night, while Evans, knocked into tomorrowland after scoring on the backhand tuck, no doubt will need a few days to reassemble the parts of his body and psyche that were sent scattering by the oncoming Scheifele locomotive.
Scheifele went a distance, at least half the sheet of ice, on his mission to clobber Evans. He was tagged with a five-minute major for the textbook charging infraction. Scheifele would be eligible to return for Game 6, which if necessary would be June 11.
Scheifele will sit for a bit, while the addled Evans, once Anders Bjork’s linemate at Notre Dame, will take some time to recover. And play will go on, until the next predator skates into a vulnerable moment and sizes up his prey for bludgeoning.
“Wow! That was a play you don’t see very often in hockey,” said Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy Thursday morning, “where a guy comes out the other side, especially with the empty net. I guarantee you that Evans did not expect to get hit in that circumstance.”
Cassidy, a coach now for 25 years, said he didn’t see “any maliciousness intended in the hit” and that it “just sort of developed.”
“It was there and he took it,” added Cassidy. “But, boy, it was a tough one to take.”
Carlo at least twice has been on the victim’s end of tough, concussion-causing hits.
“I’ve been in that position; it’s not fun,” he said. “It isn’t necessary.”
The first such hit for Carlo, in the final game of his rookie season (2016-17), was delivered by Capitals star Alex Ovechkin. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the Scheifele smack. Carlo, hooked slightly by Ovechkin, was in the process of falling down when Ovechkin connected with him, Carlo’s head rattling off the boards as a result. Concussion for Carlo, and a missed postseason.
Carlo suffered far worse this season when Capitals predator Tom Wilson lined him up, from a distance, and drove high and hard. It was akin to the Scheifele-Evans hit, but Carlo’s head slammed against the glass while Evans appeared to suffer more of a whiplash effect when Scheifele drove his right shoulder high into his shoulder/head area.
“It is hard to see,” said Carlo. “You never want to see guys get hurt, especially in situations that it could have been avoided; that is tough. But overall I think it’s on the individual player to make the right decision there.”
The right decision would have been for the charging Scheifele to keep his stick on the ice as he raced to the right post and then use it in an attempt to knock the puck off Evans’s stick. The puck already in the net as Scheifele closed, he instead chose to try to knock his opponent’s head from his body.
Everything that happened from the moment the puck slid over the line was all kinds of wrong.
“When a player approaches a player like yesterday,” Montreal coach Dominique Ducharme said Thursday, “and doesn’t try to get his stick on the puck, that’s an indication of the intent, to me.”
It’s easy to agree with his assessment. However, it’s impossible to discern anyone’s intent. Courtrooms are full of those cases. Juries often chew over them for weeks. DOPS can’t be charged with picking through a player’s brain.
Yet the act, right there on video, speaks for itself: Player charges from a distance, puck goes over the line, no attempt by aggressor to play the puck, victim blown to smithereens.
Again, no other league abides such actions, and therefore no other league deals with the same issue year after year after year.
“Brutal,” said Habs winger/agitator Brendan Gallagher, as reported Thursday in Winnipeg. “It didn’t need to happen. It’s the wrong play. He knows better.”
They all know better. They all need to be better. The league knows it, too. Yet it never ends.