Mayhem on the ice: Why the NHL needs its enforcers

By Burl Rolett

Come playoff time, the NHL's biggest beauties are forced to turn ugly.

It’s the third period in any NHL hockey game. Play is moving through the neutral zone. A forward crosses the red line and dumps the puck in. All of the sudden, the whistle blows and the crowd erupts.

Behind the play, there's a yard sale of sticks, gloves, elbow pads and helmets. Two big men have a hold of each other by the shirt collar. Their right arms are free, cocked and ready to throw.

They’ll swing at each other until they fall down or wear out. Then, the officials will break in and escort them to the sin bin for a well-deserved five-minute break. The two combatants will nod to each other across the glass and say, “Good scrap, maybe we’ll go again sometime.”

After all, it’s nothing personal — that’s just their job. They’re the enforcers. They’re the guys that coaches send out when there’s a score to settle. They fight to get even, and more importantly, they fight so their teammates don’t have to.

It usually only takes one good fight to quell rising tensions and prevent an all-out brawl. After the scrap, the game calms down and the players get back to playing hockey. It's a system that relies on hockey players to police themselves, and they do a good job of it. When games get chippy, both checking lines hit the ice. Two guys go at it, and that’s the end. That’s how it’s supposed to happen, at least.

But this season’s NHL playoffs have been different. Games have been full of cheap shots and sucker punches that have started Hanson-brother style melees. Rather than the added violence serving as an indictment of fighting, however, it’s actually a perfect example of what happens when the enforcers aren’t allowed to do their jobs.

Enforcers play an important role in the NHL. They protect the goaltenders and goal scorers and they do the dirty work on behalf of their superstars. But come the playoffs, enforcers see their ice time diminish. Teams often can’t afford to waste a roster spot on an enforcer, and coaches don’t want to throw away even one shift in the name of getting even. As a result, some of hockey’s best players are forced to take the enforcer’s work into their own hands and put themselves in harm’s way.

Claude Giroux and Sidney Crosby, two of the world’s most skilled hockey players, fought in the first period of a Flyers-Penguins game last week, a scrum that quickly devolved and ended up with each team losing its top defenseman to a game misconduct. 

“I loved it,” Flyers coach Peter Laviolette said in a post-game press conference. “That’s playoff hockey, isn’t it? Two of the world’s best players dropping the gloves.”

If the same interviewer had gotten to Laviolette at the moment his top playmaker tangled with Crosby, he probably would have had a different opinion. After all, that’s a job for Flyers forward Zac Rinaldo, the scrappy forward who logged 232 penalty minutes, including 15 fighting majors, in the regular season.

But Rinaldo also has a history of taking bad penalties. He was suspended in February for a charging penalty and fined $5,000 for two unnecessary penalties in one game in the same month. Just two games before the start of the playoffs, Rinaldo was whistled for a five-minute major and earned a game misconduct for a check from behind. Since then, Laviolette has limited his goon’s ice time, particularly as his team struggles on the penalty kill.

At least the Flyers have someone to turn to when things get rough, though. Other playoff teams simply don’t have room on their bench for an enforcer.

That was the case for Crosby’s Penguins. Steve MacIntyre, a 6’5”, 250-pound winger, is one of hockey’s most feared brawlers. But since Jan. 11, he's done his damage in the minors, with AHL affiliate Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. Pittsburgh recalled MacIntyre just once, for a little insurance ahead of an April matchup with the Flyers. For the rest of the season, there was no room for Macintyre on the 23-man roster.

The Detroit Red Wings are in the same boat, leaving them unable to appropriately respond to Nashville defenseman Shea Weber's dirty play early in the playoffs.

“We don’t have the personnel to get back at Weber, so we might as well get on with that,” Head Coach Mike Babcock said.

That wasn't entirely true. Babcock had a 6’3”, 229-pound monster on his bench in Todd Bertuzzi, a veteran of more than his share of fights. But Bertuzzi was also Detroit's sixth-leading scorer. With the Wings going up against one of the league’s top goaltenders, Babcock understood that he couldn’t afford to lose any offensive firepower, even if just for a five-minute stretch. (He would eventually let Bertuzzi loose, and after fighting Weber, the game continued with no major conflicts.)

In St. Louis, the Blues have run into a similar problem. Forward Ryan Reaves is the epitome of an NHL enforcer, amassing a team-leading 124 penalty minutes in just 60 games. But beyond his fists, Reaves doesn’t have much to offer, and so he's played only eight minutes so far this postseason.

In Reaves’s absence, the second game between the Blues and San Jose Sharks was filled with questionable play. In the third period, the Sharks' T.J. Galiardi left his feet to hit Blues forward Andy McDonald in the head. McDonald had already missed more than 50 games this year with a concussion. The situation escalated a few shifts later, when McDonald took matters into his own hands. He slew-footed San Jose All-Star Logan Couture in an inexcusably dirty play that put both players at risk for injury: Couture from the hit and McDonald from any Sharks player seeking retribution.

Then the game spiraled out of control. Every other whistle started a scrum, and the third period ended in a 10-man fight that produced 48 penalty minutes and left Sharks center Dominic Moore with a broken nose. Throughout it all, Reaves was glued to the bench, unable to settle the dispute once and for all.

Contrast that with the battle out West between the Coyotes and Blackhawks, a series marked by Raffi Torres' game three hit on Chicago star Marian Hossa that knocked Hossa out of the game and likely ended his season. After the game, Coach Joel Quenneville called the hit brutal and the officiating a disgrace. Blackhawks Captain Jonathan Toews questioned Torres’s character, saying “there’s no remorse” in a player like Torres.

The series had reached its boiling point, and frustrations could have easily spilled from the newspapers onto the ice. But both teams had their peacekeeping pugilists on hand, and five minutes into game four, the Coyotes' Paul Bissonnette and Blackhawks' Brandon Bolling dropped the gloves. They swung at each other until they fell down and then they skated away without words. Anyone who had seen the previous game, or another similar game this postseason, might have thought, “Here we go again.”

But everyone on the bench saw it differently. It was over. The two enforcers had their say and it was time to get back to hockey. There were no more fights and only eight total penalty minutes for the rest of the game.

Bissonnette did receive a game misconduct, because his jersey was not fastened down in accordance with NHL rules. But the Coyotes didn’t miss him. He’d done his job, and his scrap had saved a skill player the trouble — and inherent danger — of a score left unsettled.

Burl Rolett is Began in '96's Midwestern guest contributor. He writes regularly about the Chicago Bears at his blog, Grabowskis in Exile.