Veteran Central Pennsylvania media personality and former Hershey Bears radio color commentator Ed Coffey joins Sweetest Hockey on Earth with his observations on the game. Coffey played college hockey at Brockport State. He has coached at the youth, junior and college levels. His observations are spawned by the unique perspective, as he told us, “gained from a career sitting on the bench.”
There’s a sucker born every minute. KISS is in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. Duck Dynasty, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Dance Moms are still on television…and the NHL wants you to believe it had a revelation and now wants to cut down on workplace violence. The problem is, where workplace violence to you and me might be bending the wiper blades of the guy who parked too close to your Corolla, workplace violence in professional hockey is what you do when your team does not currently have the puck.
Pain is the price for a roster spot in hockey…But with one third of player suspensions this season for hits to the head, someone has to pay. It might Derek Engelland for coming up high or Anthony Peluso for boarding or Shawn Thornton for trying to bring the WWE to professional hockey, but someone will pay…Although this is who will not pay: The NHL. This 21st century twinge of conscience and concern for safety following the NFL’s billion dollar blood money payoff is a media grab designed to save the profits of a league that has cried poor through player lockouts and ill-advised expansion to areas of the country that have never been interested in ice that isn’t part of a mint julep. It is an insurance policy against the money that Rogers will make with its Canadian TV Deal…A deal so lucrative that highly placed sources say Canada will be changing its name to Rogers at the conclusion of the 2016-2017 season.
As other professional sports have moved ahead, hockey remains feudal. Billions in hush money to brain damaged former players as a result of administratively sanctioned denial is the cost of doing business in the National Football League, and NFL owners haven’t been seen cutting corners with tee times or restaurant reservations. The NHL isn’t quite as flush with cash, and NHL owners are filling the castle moats and preparing the burning oil to drop on the NHLPA.
The counter might be that every major sports league has expanded, and the talent is still there. The issue in the NHL is that ballooning from six to thirty teams means that, although the talent cream will still rise to the top, somewhere along the line players must be signed who dilute the league by five hundred percent. For every Big Bang Theory there is a Keeping Up With The Kardashians. For every Sidney Crosby there is an Antoine Roussel. The problem is that Roussel still makes $600,000 a year whether you have heard of him or not. The problem is also that television executives have discovered that there is still an audience for Keeping Up With The Kardashians.
Meanwhile, Gary Bettman, who comes to the NHL from a sport where a foul is called for brushing against a forward’s sleeveless undershirt, the last two minutes of a game take approximately three hours to play and the star system is more entrenched than Clark Gable in the golden age of Hollywood, is a bottom line guy. He may not know the difference between off sides and icing, but he does know which side his bread is buttered on. Bettman doesn’t want the violence to end and neither do the owners. They know the knuckle draggers committing the head shots are generally not the same players putting the puck in the net. So violence is punished with a wink and a nod…and we are reminded that taking violence out of hockey is like taking speeding out of NASCAR. Seriously meting out punishment for dirty hits will take away our villains, and hockey, which already ranks below college basketball and just edges out men’s tennis, boxing and horse racing in popularity, will lose ground for all but real fans of the game…and that’s not in Bettman’s plans. We will watch Duck Dynasty because it is a soap opera for men. We will not question when one of the Deliverance extras, whose name escapes me at the moment, gets suspended for a couple of shows to coincide with a book release, and professional hockey will continue to talk about cracking down on violence while the cheers in the stands remain as loud for a bone crunching hit as for a goal.
