Sidney Crosby was in the midst of a historic season in 2010-2011. At the halfway point, he had 32 goals and 66 points in only 41 games. Prorate that for a full year and you're looking at 64 goals and 132 points...impressive enough, but even more amazing when one considers that Crosby was putting up these numbers during a season in which the average goal-scoring output of an NHL game was 5.46, far lower than during the days when Gretzky and Lemieux were rewriting the record-book. Consider: Daniel Sedin ended up leading the league in scoring with 104 points...no one else cracked 100. Crosby was on pace for 132.
It's even debatable that Crosby's 2010-2011 season was, in terms of goal-scoring dominance relative to the rest of the league, almost as impressive as Wayne Gretzky's 92-goal campaign in 1981-1982. Gretzky scored 92 when the league was averaging 8 goals per game, Crosby was on pace for 64 in a season where the average was 5.46. You can do the math for yourself.
Why bring up Crosby's campaign? Because, of course, it was tragically ended in early January when Crosby suffered concussions in two consecutive games: the first during the New Year's Winter Classic when Washington's David Steckel hit Crosby in the head while skating up the ice, and the second in the very next game, when Tampa Bay's Victor Hedman pressed Crosby into the boards (why the Penguins' training staff let Crosby play this game is mind-boggling, pardon the pun).
And so we, as hockey fans, were robbed of seeing something special. Hopefully it was just the season that we were robbed of, and not Crosby's career, which has (or at least, had) a good chance of developing into one that is/was worthy of discussion with the Pantheon names of Gretzky, Orr, Lemieux and Howe. I am fearful...having seen the careers of Eric Lindros and Marc Savard derailed, I find it difficult to be optimistic about Crosby's future. And the thought of the NHL losing its marquee player makes me sick.
When I was younger, I cared about who won games and who lost them, as most sports fans do. The old me might have cheered the Crosby injury...as a Devils' fan, the loss of a division rival's best player was certainly advantageous. But as sports fans grow more mature, most realize that the wins and losses of certain teams are ephemeral...what we truly want to see is greatness, talent, the ability to do something special. Crosby gave us those things, and now he may not.
Whether Steckel meant to hit Crosby in the head as he skated up-ice is up for debate. What matters it that the injury to Crosby came at a point when the NHL was already facing criticism for not dealing with the issue of headshots properly. They buried their head in the sand, hoping the problem would go away, and it came back to haunt them about as badly as one could imagine.
The solution is staring everyone in the face: assess a five-minute major for all headshots, and then look at suspensions as supplementary punishment if the headshot is deemed intentional. Suspensions, tough as they seem, actually don't act as much of a deterrent: a team can just send out a goon to take out a star, and then replace said goon with another when they get suspended. But penalties hurt a team during that game: people will think twice about being careless with their shoulders or elbows if they have to watch their team kill a penalty for five minutes as a result.
Some purists argue that doing this will taking hitting out of the game. Wrong...it will take dangerous hitting out of the game. The clearest parallel is the penalty for high-sticking. It doesn't matter if you meant to high-stick someone, or if you high-sticked them from their blindside, or north-south, or east-west, or any of the other excuses and doublespeak that the NHL came up with to excuse headshots. If you high-stick someone, you get a penalty. That hasn't made players slow down and not attempt to lift players' sticks or bat down pucks in the air. But you can bet there would be a whole lot more sticks to the face if there wasn't a high-sticking penalty, or if it was protected by the same vague language that the headshot rule is.
There may be some spectacular open-ice hits that we miss out on as a result of a zero-tolerance approach to headshots. Scott Stevens, one of my favourite all-time players, wouldn't have been able to thrive to the degree that he did in today's NHL...his hit on Lindros was certainly questionable, and his hit in the Stanley Cup finals on Paul Kariya was unquestionably dirty (it was both late and a deliberate headshot). Did I love watching Stevens dole out punishment? Of course! But knowing what we know about the long-term brain damage it inflicts, it may be worth sacrificing. If it comes to a decision between missing one or two awe-inspiring hits by Scott Stevens per season and the entire career of Sidney Crosby, as a hockey fan, I'll take the latter.
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