Let’s start from the beginning.

Two Sunday ago I was catching up on some reading when the following tweet appeared in my feed:

“Who’s got two thumbs and an email string featuring Colin Campbell going berserk on Stephen Walkom after a bad call on his kid? THIS GUY.”

That, courtesy of one Tyler Dellow. I’m aware of Dellow’s existence because he writes an Oilers/general-hockey blog that I’ve grown to appreciate. A few minutes later, this post was published on Dellow’s website, and a few minutes after that the hockey world exploded. You can read the details for yourself but the short version is that Colin Campbell and Stephen Walkom, then and now former director of officiating, exchanged some emails that were later subpoenaed in regards to a labor dispute. In those emails, Campbell references players, officials, and specific penalty calls. The names and dates were partially redacted so no one recognized anything out of the ordinary at a quick glance. Dellow followed up, cross referencing dates with box scores, and was able to reveal the identity of two players. One mentioned was Colin Campbell’s son, Greggory, and the other, Marc Savard, a player who was involved in one of the more controversial rulings in Colin Campbell’s tenure as vice president of hockey operations. So here we go.

Before I get into the actual emails themselves I want to make one more additional point. Dellow is a blogger who performed an act of journalism by investigating and uncovering details within public records. He’s not a journalist but he performed an act of journalism. One of the major tenants of journalism, at least in my understanding, is trust — trust that the foundational details in the story are authentic. To gain trust, one needs to either belong to a news organization with stored reputational capital or build a following from nothing that trusts the content/producer package on a more personal level.

Tyler Dellow doesn’t need me to defend him. His work stands for itself. He grabbed my attention with a post on long term contracts as it relates to player escrow in the National Hockey League and I’ve been paying attention to him ever since. I trust him because I know what he’s about. To question his credibility and trustworthiness is understandable if you are unfamiliar with any of his work but to attack him based on this individual instance and his not being attached to a mainstream outlet, is a mistake. I spend time reading Dellow and I resent the following:

“We don’t know the context of the emails. The blogger is the guy, as a matter of fact, that should stand up and apologize.” - Dave Maloney during a post-game panel discussion on VS

“…some blogger – who I don’t even want to give him any credit – who’s upset… all of a sudden these guys are getting their 15 seconds of fame in interviews.” – Colin Campbell during an interview with James Duthie of TSN

I do not know why Dellow is even being criticized. The focus should be on arguing the implications and assumptions people are making based on these emails not the information itself or the manner in which this information became public knowledge.

* * *

I know to be careful how I word any kind of reaction to Campbell’s emails. People have come to sort of expect blind irrationality from fans and I want be completely fair.

The tone Campbell uses is very casual. That may just be how Campbell and Walkom would typically communicate. I have no idea. I’m obviously not privy to the sensitivities of both men involved. I think it’s fairly clear, however, that regardless of your preconceived opinion of Campbell, some of what he says is totally unprofessional and inappropriate given that he is a league executive and the emails are work related. It’s that simple.

There are parts of the Campbell emails that are just incredible. He complains and petitions against penalties called against his own son, Greg Campbell, twice, once after having only heard the play be described on a radio broadcast. He personally attacks Marc Savard citing his time having coached Sav while both were with the Rangers twelve years prior.

What these emails really do is give the hockey world a brief look into the mind of Colin Campbell. A slice of his character is revealed. He obviously has entrenched opinions of many hockey people and his presence as an authority figure opens the door to allegations of nepotism. He’s very plugged into the league at an emotional level.

Wherever you come out on this stuff, the following is clear: the NHL vice president of hockey operations has a lot of baggage and there are documents that suggest he struggles at time to separate himself from this baggage when communicating with his colleagues.

* * *

That being said, this email controversy is but just an aside to the Colin Campbell, NHL executive story.

The grander picture is that Colin Campbell has done a poor job overseeing the supplementary disciplinary system, his primary responsibility. The fact is his system is doing very little to reduce concussion inducing body checks. The concussion rate in the National Hockey League is rising. Says, Elliotte Friedman on November 8th blog post:

“This season, we are approaching 30 concussions (I counted 29, including Paul Kariya), which puts the league on pace for approximately 175. That would smash the 2000-01 record of 109.”

There have been times when I chose not to address a situation in which Colin Campbell has made a ruling because I couldn’t stand facing the obvious defense of, well, no matter what Campbell decides, his judgment will be criticized. I hate that Campbell and his supporters are using this angle to try and drum up sympathy. Its bull shit. He would get a lot more support from the universal fan if he made these judgments more consistent. It’s not complicated. Campbell opens himself up to a tremendous amount of criticism from every market by not having any kind of logical standard.

* * *

Big journalism did the right thing by grabbing a couple former officials and giving them a chance to tell a story, anonymously if they wanted. Most testified they operated without influence from the man atop the judiciary pyramid. That’s good news. But what about the future now that officials know Campbell is willing to voice his opinion on penalty calls made against his own son? That’s a major question.

Pretty much everything that has come out of Colin Campbell’s mouth in the aftermath has made him and the league look progressively worse. He has defended himself horribly and illogically by responding to questions of general implications with attacks against specific implications. He continues to emphasize that he has no effect on referee decisions on the ice while the game is in play thereby making it impossible for him to meddle with officiating, an indicator that he’s totally missing the point. He continues to reaffirm the separation between his opinion of Marc Savard in 2007 to his ruling on Matt Cooke in 2010 which is a valid point but still not attacking the meat of the issue. Oh, and just repeating twisted versions of popular public opinion and labeling them absurd, does not, in fact, make them absurd.

He is, however, willing to admit his ignorance over the fact that private emails were retrievable in the instance of a court order which is frankly embarrassing. So then instead of communicating via email, Campbell, in hindsight would have just picked up a telephone to express his opinion. What kind of defense is that? He has shown time and time again that he’s unwilling to acknowledge the severity of this matter, as if using dismissive words are what will repair his tarnished reputation. It’s much ado about nothing and a hockey dad venting, claims Campbell in a statement made to TSN the day that followed the emails appearing on Dellow’s website. There is downplaying and then there’s insulting the public’s collective intelligence.

The emails themselves were disconcerting and damaged his reputation permanently but the interviews Campbell did after the details in the emails were released, suggest he’s not even aware of his wrong doings. The NHL needs to distance themselves from this guy. At the very least, his power and authority need to be reduced. The lack of professionalism Campbell has demonstrated and the baggage he carries will cause people to forever question his integrity — fairly or unfairly. The countdown to the end of his tenure started about nine days ago. The NHL can drag its feet but when the separation actually occurs, people like me will look back and say, well, it only took X-number of days for this issue to finally resolve itself. The question at hand does not start with now what, but how long.

The good news is that the NHL has noticed and recently began serious talks of change. It’s encouraging to read a report like this . Here’s a few things I’d like to see happen:

• Colin Campbell must take a lesser role. Currently he’s the Director of Hockey Operations. He’s basically the leagues principal disciplinarian. He really hasn’t done a very good job lately, in my opinion. I understand the punishment that he distributes reflects the current rules but the fact that his office treats star players differently than ordinary role players is unacceptable. Plus, his son is a player in the NHL ! Talk about a conflict of interest. I’m sure he’s professional but how can emotions not get involved some of the time? He’s human. I’m sorry, but someone with such a powerful position who needs to have an unbiased outlook on all players, can’t have an immediate family member within that group. The league needs someone new making these decisions.

• Publicize the rule changes to players, coaches, managers, owners, media, and fans. There can’t be any more media members watch a hit and unanimously say this incident will be a suspension of five games then tomorrow we find out there’s no suspension at all. Everyone has a different interpretation of the rules. It’s chaos. Unbiased observers can’t decide whether the hit is fair or not and they certainly can’t predict what the league is going to do about it. There’s no standard.

• Make the following illegal. Any hit delivered to a player from behind in which the player receiving the check is unable to realistically protect himself. That’s different from a player that has his head down. Hits made from behind are totally unexpected. Hits should only be made on players that have the puck or had the puck just moments before. Players that do not have the puck are not expecting to be in a situation where they must protect themselves. Also, any hit where the head absorbs the majority of the contact. This is obvious. Body checks have to be done safely. It’s like blocking someone in football by taking out there knees. It’s just cheap and unsafe.

• Increase and standardize the punishment. I realize that hits from behind are already illegal and are already considered a penalty but these situations need to be handled differently than a tripping infraction. I suggest that the first time something like this happens, the league office issues an official warning. After that, the next incident is a ten game suspension and every incident after that is twenty games. In the playoffs, a player who has been warned should be suspended for the rest of the playoff series. No more of this discussion of whether the player should get three games or two games or five games. Just make it the same across the board and make it severe. Mistakes happen on the ice, but some players are habitual offenders. Those are the players that need to be reprimanded. As far as knee on knee hits and other obscure dirty plays like a deliberate elbow or something of that matter, the current disciplinary policy seems to address those incidents well.

All these changes are done for two reasons. (1) Players need to be given a fair opportunity to protect themselves and (2) they need to be checked in a way that is safe. I think we can all agree that protecting players is in everyone’s best interest. And to the hockey purists/traditionalists: I refuse to believe that the intensity with which hockey is played will be sacrificed if the league takes a renewed approach to safety.

Update:

I just got an email that raises a good point. There will always be a lot of ambiguity in what qualifies as a suspendible hit and what is considered legal. There will always be players that push the limits. That’s why the punishment should be severe. After the new boundary is established, players will back off. Implementing new rules with stricter punishments restricts the margins. In a few years after the new rules, fans will no doubt be discussing the difference between a hit on a player who has the puck and a hit on a player who passed the puck just a half second before he was hit. Should the latter be legal, they’ll wonder. If that’s the new margin between questionably legal hits and illegal hits, I can live with that. There shouldn’t even be a discussion as to whether or not a defenseless hit to the head is legal or not which at the present is basically what the league disciplinary committee must determine. The stakes are too high, in my opinion. Just accept that ambiguity will always exist in a league that must rely on a subjective opinion to enforce rules. Some actions though shouldn’t be legally ambiguous. They should be declared as totally unacceptable and intolerable.

First of all, I think everyone, whether they follow sports or not, would agree that this type of behavior does not belong in sports. Even kids know that. It was ridiculous.

But it was also a mistake made during a game that requires a lot of emotion. Ballard doesn’t want to hurt his goaltender. It’s ludicrous to suggest otherwise. Still, apologizing and admitting that it was a mistake doesn’t change the significance of the infraction. He’s honestly lucky his carelessness didn’t result in a worse injury.

Don’t take what I’m about to say as a defense for Ballard’s action, but I don’t think he should have been suspended (he wasn’t, by the way). The only arguments I’ve heard in favor of a suspension are about sending a message to Ballard, to other professional players, and to young hockey players, that this type of behavior can not and will not be tolerated. As if that isn’t obvious already.

Suspensions are supposed to help establish a line between what is fair and legal, and what is not. There is no ambiguity in Ballard’s case. It wasn’t even a hockey play. Historically, while I may hate this practice, the NHL has basically used suspensions as a way of awarding justice to a wronged team that has an injured player. The offending player is suspended and the matter is supposedly resolved. Ballard injured a teammate though so you can throw justice along with intent out the window as cause for a suspension. I think this is a team issue. The appropriate thing to do is to allow the Panthers to handle it internally. No one was effected greater by this mistake than the Panthers themselves. By suspending Ballard, the league would be undermining the concept of the team not to mention conceding to the possibility that this could happen again. No player has ever swung his stick in frustration, baseball style, and struck his own goaltender in the head before now. Could it really happen again?

Besides, what really is the value of having Ballard sit out a few games? What’s the purpose other than to help extinguish this public relations nightmare? If no one else minds, I’d like to now forget this ever happened.

It doesn’t have to be a player of prominence like Drury, but it could be and that’s all that matters. If it’s clean, if it’s dirty, it doesn’t make a difference because injuries happen on both. Granted, their more likely to happen and are generally more severe on dirty hits. A broken bone is one thing but some hits, especially those to he head, are threatening the life and well-being of the player that is being hit. After it happens, the circumstances are irrelevant; the hit was delivered, and the injury sustained.

The idea is to avoid all that nonsense altogether, right? I mean, Kaleta is a great player, but I’d rather see him lay someone out who has the puck, as a means of separating him from the puck. Instead, because of the way the league is enforced, his role is primarily that of a statement player – a threat that reminds opponents what goes around, comes around. If you hit one of the Sabres best players at any time, for any reason, Kaleta will return the favor.

You know what the Florida Panthers do not have? They don’t have a Pat Kaleta type player. So when Mike Richards was on the ice last Friday, he was willing to take a chance for a big play and lined David Booth up in the middle of the ice for a ferocious hit . Bad things always happen when players skating across the ice make contact with players skating up the ice because the head is always vulnerable in that position.

There are a couple things I want to say about this hit. First of all, the hit itself looks technically fair and legal. Richards made contact with his shoulder, not his elbow. He didn’t jump into Booth. Even though Richards’ feet left the ground after contact, it was clearly the collision that caused his skates to leave the ice. That’s about all I liked about the hit though. The timing was awful. Booth had passed the puck (and was on his linemates stick) long before Richards even initiated contact. Clearly, Richards didn’t anticipate that Booth would slide the puck over to his winger. The game speed is very fast in hockey and it would be impossible to expect Richards to recognize the pass and change his course. Had Booth held onto the puck he probably would have seen Richards approaching. Everything could have been different.

But things didn’t work out the way Richards planned or expected. The hit was late and struck a vulnerable, unsuspecting Booth in the head. I’m not suggesting that contact needs to be down-scaled. There are plenty of opportunities to deliver hard, fair hits in this game. I think we all can agree though that the type of hit that Richards delivered does not belong in the NHL. Hits like that should never happen. The NHL is sending the wrong message to players and fans by continuing to allow it.

Not only are they allowing it, but they’re enabling it. Richards was not suspended for the hit which I find to be ridiculous. The evidence of the hit being late is irrefutable. Whether or not Richards meant for the hit to be late is not important. I haven’t seen anything about his game that suggests he’s a dirty player but again the fact of the matter is the hit was late. What does intent have to do with what happened? He took a chance in hopes of making a big play. Richards made a choice and the league should stand up and say, okay, you took a chance and while your intent was tolerable, the result is not and for that reason you’re suspended.

The league maintains that Richards’ hit did not reflect an intent to injure. If that’s the only standard the league uses when considering suspensions as it appears to be, then I don’t agree with it. If Richards’ hit falls into what is considered acceptable by league standards, then they need to be changed. Two things: (1)The league needs to set higher infractions for hits to the head and for (2) hits to unsuspecting players who don’t have control of the puck. This seems obvious to me but apparently not the NHL. These are just the issues brought about by the Richards hit on Booth.

It sucks that this is such a large enough issue that I felt I had to write about it. These incidents (usually involving the boards) happen every year and the media does a good enough job addressing it. Eventually the sentiment of hockey being a contact sport overrules the plea for head safety. No one wants to see contact leave the sport but where do we draw the line? An unsuspecting hit to the head seems like a good place to me. I’m willing to sacrifice some clean body shots if it meant we wouldn’t see any more of these devastating collisions to the head.

Why wouldn’t the league want to protect their players? I don’t have an answer. The NHL is controlled by too many purists and not enough sensible innovators. Their leadership has held the progress of this league back for years. I find myself feeling frustrated by it. Just as much to blame though is the players union. This is their issue more than the leagues. Too bad they seem completely inept and totally dysfunctional.

What is it going to take? Does someone have to die? It’s not unreasonable to say it could happen. It might happen in fact if these dangerous hits are allowed to continue.