All posts by zchamu

Chara and Pacioretty and Ugh.

It’s a tough video to watch. Zdeno Chara, the 15-foot-tall Captain of the Boston Bruins, lays a check on Max Pacioretty. Pacioretty hits the edge of the glass at the end of the bench and then hits the ice, face down, incapacitated. The Habs trainer is immediately at his side. Play is stopped, and Pacioretty still isn’t moving. Then they pull out the stretcher, while in the background Chara is ushered in to the box.

It wasn’t pretty. Pacioretty was knocked unconscious, with cracked vertebrae and a nasty concussion. His season is over; he’s lucky his career isn’t over.

Pacioretty was victim to a check from an enormous man at a really bad spot on the ice. Chara isn’t really known as a particularly dirty player. He’s just huge, his elbows falling at most people’s ears.

And that’s the way the NHL sees it. The NHL doesn’t seem to mind that Pacioretty has a broken neck. Chara received no further penalties after the game.

There seems to be a theme: if it doesn’t appear to be a ‘retaliatory’ hit then the NHL is letting it go. The two sharp, nasty-looking head shots that ultimately sidelined Sidney Crosby were just game incidents, according to the refs and the NHL. No big thang. So Crosby sits at his parents’ place in Cole Harbour playing xBox because he cannot go 10 days without concussion symptoms and collecting $452,985 every time he takes a crap. All for no big thang.

According to the Concussion Blog, he’s not alone: there have been 72 concussions in the NHL this season alone – and counting.  These hits are nothing new. And if the hit had been the other way around, a Habs player knocking out a Bruins player, the Habs fans would be defending it nine ways to Sunday.

So to call the Montreal Police and ask them to investigate the Chara hit, well, it’s a bit rich. Because for years, for pretty much ever, this is what happens in the NHL. You can’t stand on your feet and cheer when your enforcer drops the gloves and starts pounding another guy in the head, then in the next breath clutch your pearls when someone gets hurt on a check.  This hit had really bad consequences, but it wasn’t a particularly different or more vicious hit than any other average Tuesday night in the NHL.

Of course, Montreal being Montreal, the place that calls 911 when their pizza delivery is late, the place that burns itself down when their team *wins* in the playoffs, nobody could expect them to apply common sense or reasoning to the situation.

Still, maybe this is the crossroads. Maybe this is the part where the fans, the sponsors, the players finally say, something is wrong here. Even if Gary Bettman wants to dig in his abnormally small heels and cover his ears and say “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”, maybe everyone else will finally see it.

70 concussions by March.

Really?

[Image: Shaun Best, Reuters]