Mario Thinks NHL's Brawling Is Super Pain -- He's Right

Nevermind that I think the NHL's continued acceptance of the "culture'' of full-scale, mindless violence stinks. I'm an NBA guy. I'm endlessly appalled at the double-standard applied to the two leagues when fights break out. I'm also a fan of the beauty of hockey, on display more when the gloves are on rather than off, so to serious NHL supporters, that probably makes me soft.

So, forget how I feel about it.

Mario Lemieux thinks it stinks, too. Mario Lemieux. Do you really need anyone else to slap some sense into you about this?

I don't. If Super Mario says that spectacles like the one his Pittsburgh Penguins and the New York Islanders inflicted upon the sports world Friday night makes him "need to re-think whether I want to be a part of it,'' then we all need to re-think what we've let the league get away with serving us.

Lemieux's four-paragraph reaction to the mega-brawl, its aftermath and the NHL's feeble punishment, is a lead story on the Penguins' website, and fairly so. He is still a co-owner, still the guy who saved hockey in Pittsburgh, still one of the handful of players by which every other before and since is measured, still one of an even smaller handful that was capable, on and off his skates, to take the NHL to the masses.

Hockey in North America needs people like Mario Lemieux. It doesn't need the rink full of knuckleheads who last weekend set the game back more than three decades.

Literally so. All over the hockey-speaking world are accounts of the seemingly endless mayhem, complete with references to the movie "Slap Shot" (released in 1977) and the old Broad Street Bullies (circa 1974).

How does this help the NHL? How does this help hockey, period, since this didn't take place in a vacuum? Relatively speaking, it was an isolated incident, because by pretty much every measure, fighting on the scale of Friday night's is down from the ugliest days of the past. These things don't happen every night -- but neither do near-riots like the one in Auburn Hills, with Ron Artest in the center of it, in 2004, and the NBA is just coming out from under that cloud now.


The punch-fest on Long Island looks even worse within a much-wider context:

The league's brightest star, Sidney Crosby, is going into his sixth week out of action with a concussion; his absence included All-Star Weekend, erasing a big reason the casual fan would have to tune in. Meanwhile, another star, the Bruins' Marc Savard, is out for the rest of the season thanks to another concussion. Just a not-at-all-subtle reminder that it's hard enough to stay healthy, even if you rule the sport, when the hits are clean and the brawling is at a minimum.

You think that with Crosby out and the Capitals' Alex Ovechkin still slumping (whether he wants to admit it), the NHL might want to keep its more gruesome elements in check so as not to alienate anybody sitting on the fence in terms of paying real attention to them.

Maybe the NHL does. But it has a terrible way of showing it: with little else riveting happening to shift focus away from them, the Penguins and Isles go Hanson Brothers on each other, to the tune of 346 penalty minutes -- and nearly all of it a result of one irredeemably cheap shot or another by players on both teams -- with no regard to the consequences.

The problem with that is two-fold.

First, the NHL barely offered up any real consequences. Exactly two players, both Islanders, were hit up by the league for their actions in the game, Trevor Gillies for nine games and Matt Martin four games. (That doesn't include Pittsburgh's Eric Godard, who was going to get an automatic 10-game suspension anyway for leaving the bench.) The Islanders were fined $100,000, which might be stiff for the perpetually broke franchise but, in light of their actual accountability in the fight, was really a slap on the wrist.

That's what set Lemieux off. You can't blame him.

"(W)hat happened Friday night on Long Island wasn't hockey. It was a travesty. It was painful to watch the game I love turn into a sideshow like that,'' his statement read, in part. "The NHL had a chance to send a clear and strong message that those kinds of actions are unacceptable and embarrassing to the sport. It failed.''

Did it ever.

Some proof: after the huge fight in the stands at that 2004 Pistons-Pacers NBA game, nine players were suspended, Artest for the remainder of the season. Amazingly even to this day, the Pistons' organization was never fined, although it was instructed to greatly improve its security at its arena. Nevertheless, regardless of what many say about the NBA (much of it involving the word "thug''), when it decided to put a halt to on-court brawls and stop its bleeding popularity, it did so in no uncertain terms.
Which brings us to the other consequences of Friday Night at the Fights: once again, the spotlight was on the NHL because of a ridiculous, out-of-control, on-ice slugfest, and not because of any of its other attractive and marketable qualities.

Which brings us to the other consequences of Friday Night at the Fights: once again, the spotlight was on the NHL because of a ridiculous, out-of-control, on-ice slugfest, and not because of any of its other attractive and marketable qualities. That fight may have gotten more "SportsCenter'' time, space in the papers and heavy play on the websites (like this one) than everything Crosby, Ovechkin and the All-Star Game did combined.

It all raises the question the NHL ought to be tired of still facing in 2011: is this the way we want our sport to be presented? It's once again flushed away another quadrennial rush of excitement after an Olympics -- which, last year, was not only devoid of the stupid brawling as usual, but was capped with a Canada-U.S. gold-medal game, chock full of stars and won in overtime by Crosby. Forgot already, didn't you?

But you remember the maulers scattered all over the ice in Uniondale on Friday, and the players rushing the length of the ice to thrown down the gloves.

So I'm tired of it. The borderline fan who wants to embrace the better aspects of the game are tired of it, Mario Lemieux is tired of it, and chances are pretty good that a majority of the players are tired of it.

So, NHL, when are you going to get tired of it?