Stanley Cup: Rome's suspension signals start of NHL concussion plans

Part six of our season-long series: An Australian on Ice Hockey

Aaron Rome's season has passed on. It lies on a gurney next to Nathan Horton's, the man whose Stanley Cup dreams now depend totally on how well he's able to recover from Rome's blindside hit. He was yesterday suspended for four matches by the NHL's temporary Arbiter of Justice, Mike Murphy, a decision greeted with disdain on both sides of the continent.

In encouraging signs for the NHL, they've got this one right. Just as they did so by turning a lemon into lemonade with the Thrashers' relocation to Winnipeg, when faced with two very tricky situations (this Rome hit and that relocation) a commission notoriously unpopular in Canada has made excellent, reasoned decisions. This comes on the back of the NHL All-Star Game breaking with tradition and opting for a "captain's choice" format. Three times, the NHL has faced issues which could derail or overshadow their season. On each issue they've come out on top. It would have been easy just to keep on trucking with the Great Southern Experiment and just as easy to suspend Rome for one or two games.

By levying such a heavy tax on the offender the NHL has announced they will no longer stand for blindside hits that endanger players. The penny, it seems, has finally dropped. Hockey, like the NFL and even baseball needs to minimise the effects of violent contact to the head. With such writers like Malcolm Gladwell weighing in on the area of concussions in sport, popular opinion has begun to swing from "entertainment" to "safety". With hockey and football, where mandated violence is such a staple, reduction in head-hits are best achieved through via punishment doled out by the league's HQ.

As much as it will upset the traditionalists, hockey's rules need to change. In the wake of Crosby-gate and the Zdeno Chara/Max Pacioretty hit, the league has to reinforce to players that hits to the head will not be countenanced. After the Chara/Pacioretty affair, we discussed the need for players of all sports - but particularly hockey players - to realise the need for a duty of care: a player's first duty should be to win, but not at the expense of their (or their colleagues') safety.

Rome's suspension is the first sign the NHL believes the same and are acting to clean up hockey.

Any suggestion that the game would suffer were they to penalise players for head-high contact is rubbish. People watch hockey for the game itself, not the surrounding hullabaloo - it's easy to suggest only a very small percentage of viewers would turn off the NHL were the league to crack down on head-high contact. The same could be said for fighting although hockey fights are more WWE than the die-hard fan cares to admit.

Many leagues have cleaned up their act and gone on to produce a better product. The NBA suffered from a poor popular perception during the 1970s and early 1980s. Fighting and cocaine were destroying the league, but when commissioner David Stern began his reign, heavy fines and suspensions were levied on fighting and drug use, which became more and more uncommon. Pro basketball was no longer seen as a competition for thugs and junkies. It is currently enjoying the end of perhaps it's greatest season in recent memory.

The same occurred for the AFL who, after several incidents like Leigh Matthews being charged with assault in the mid-80s, created a much more family-friendly league by instituting retrospective penalties for incidents in-game officials may have missed. The Australian Football League probably leads the league in family appeal and it's all-inclusive nature.

The second step forward for the NHL was taken today (Wednesday) when the League's collection of General Managers voted to take an amended "Rule 48" to the Players' Association - essentially penalising any contact to the head with in-game penalties or even suspensions. This is a great step by a league who's surprisingly made good decision after good decision starting with the All-Star game - but the ultimate responsibility for player safety depends not just on the league's head honchos, but also on the individual players themselves.

Read more "An Australian on Ice Hockey":

Part 5: The Psychology of Choking

Part 4: Canadiens vs Boston the Austin Powers NHL playoff matchup

Part 3: Chara's Pacioretty hit means a lot for NHL - and pro sport

Part 2: NHL All-Star Shakeup a great idea

Part 1: You make excuses for the Habs

Images courtesy: sports.yahoo.com and espn.com

The Psychology of Choking

Part 5 of our continuing series: An Australian on Ice Hockey.

Part 1: You make excuses for the Habs

Part 2: NHL All-Star Game shakeup a great idea

Part 3: Chara's Pacioretty hit means a lot for NHL - and pro sport

Part 4: Canadiens vs. Boston the Austin Powers NHL Playoff matchup

When the Chicago Blackhawks scored with little over a minute remaining to tie their Game 7 first-round playoff match with the Vancouver Canucks last night, I got really excited. Not because I particularly like Chicago or dislike the Canucks, but because an upset was in the offing and the Canucks were going to choke against the Hawks again! I wanted to see Chicago come back from 3-0 down in the series to win; comebacks of those proportions happen once in a generation, if that often. That Alexandre Burrows shot the Canucks into the second round after only a few minutes of overtime came as a bit of a let down, but it prompted a left-brain/right-brain discussion for me.

The question must be asked whether it was again the much-feted Vancouver choke or just oustanding play by the Blackhawks that allowed their comeback. At this stage, no-one in the West of Canada cares much about anything else (it was stories 1,2 3 and 6 on the Vancouver news last night) as the Sedins-led squad has finally beaten their playoff nemesis, but is it fair simply to lay the blame on the Canucks being overwhelmed by the situation? Against an eighth-seeded Chicago, shorn of many of their Stanley Cup winning squad from a year ago?

The answer is that choking just isn't as simple as all that - it's a multifactorial occurrence, as for a favourite to lose to an underdog requires many different ducks to be in the right row. While it's easy to see one individual player become lost in the moment, for an entire team to choke depends on all the members of that squad - or a certain subsection, for example, the forwards - almost simultaneously losing their own collective consciousness.

Choking as a team isn't a favourite being outplayed. A team can be said to choke when they look at their lesser opponents (and there can't be any debate on who has the better team), and think "Hang on, we should be beating these guys", provoking a negative, rather than positive performance. Often a choke looks like a player/club trying not to make mistakes, rather than going out to win a match/series. Choking isn't just a one-seed being beaten by an eight-seed - it's when the favourite looks at their opposition and collectively soils themselves at the very concept of losing, by virtue of their opposition, the big picture or that they're already perceived as chokers.

Otherwise, San Antonio's probable series loss to Memphis in this year's NBA playoffs would be called just that, and it's not. In truth, Memphis have outplayed the Spurs after tanking their last couple of games during the regular season to make sure they met in the postseason. The simple fact is with a lineup featuring Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, Tony Parker and Antonio McDyess all playing big minutes, the club has the stones to come through in the clutch as all have proved themselves in the NBA Finals time and again. The Spurs are failing because they're being outplayed by a younger, hungrier and healthier team.

The suggestion - and I can't prove it - is that a team choking is much, much harder to do than is regularly attributed. The reason so many clubs are said to be chokers *cough* Vancouver, South Africa, New Zealand *cough* is because popular perception is that each of these clubs should be so good as to be untouchable in the playoffs. This is a flawed notion, because it completely disregards in most cases (cricket is perhaps the exception), the simple fact that it is the playoffs changes the game, perhaps to the benefit of a club (cf. the current Boston Celtics) and occasionally to the detriment (cf. the Canucks). Team choking - while it still does happen - depends on so many people "losing it" in synchrony, that it's become much more an issue of public perception than of a team's performance. Teams are said to be chokers because they bear the weight of public expectation.

The great, all-time chokes tend to come from solo sports: Greg Norman was famous for it, as was Slovak tennis player Miloslav Mecir, who was so overwhelmed by the moment on one occasion that he served underarm. In Rugby Union, any time the All Blacks fail to win the World Cup, it is deemed a choke. The same applies to South Africa and India during the cricket World Cup - although South Africa almost certainly performed the Team Choke when losing to Australia in the 1999 World Cup. These are unfair generalisations and dont't take into account the context in which each game - or tournament - was played.

While the Canucks mercifully move on to face Nashville, they may have shaken their "chokers" tag - at least for now. But hopefully, one of the overused terms in sports journalism is now starting to be applied more contextually.

The author of this post would like to put on the record that he is not a psychologist, and has only the most basic training in psychology, but thought the title was quite snappy, so stuck with it.

Montreal Canadiens vs Boston Bruins the Austin Powers NHL playoff matchup

Part 4 of our continuing series: An Australian on Ice Hockey.

Part 1: You make excuses for the Habs

Part 2: NHL All-Star Game shakeup a great idea

Part 3: Chara's Pacioretty hit means a lot for NHL - and pro sport

Part 5: The Psychology of Choking

When it comes to sporting rivalries, the Canadiens/Bruins East coast hockey rivalry is amongst the most intense, challenging perhaps only the Spanish Clasico and Glasgow's Old Firm derby. Understandable too: both are "Original Six" franchises - one of the six teams who sustained the foundling NHL from 1943-1967 when the league first expanded. Both have had amongst the game's most iconic players - from the Bruins' Bobby Orr (inexplicably selected by insert redneck adjective here Don Cherry as the best hockey player ever - I'm not debating he's good, just that Gretzky was better) to the Habs' Maurice Richard.

Both teams are ranked first and fourth on the all-time list of Stanley Cup champions and both haven't won the big shamu since the early nineties. This matchup sees Montreal, one of the world's best-looking cities (seriously guys, if you're single, MTL's the place to be), playing a seven-game series against the ugliest city - and we're not talking landscapes here - on the face arse of the planet, Boston, only six hundred kilometres away. Both teams feature supporters who struggle to pronounce lots of common English words. To quote Doctor Evil - "we're not so different, you and I".

And they've got recent history too. When Zdeno Chara put Max Pacioretty into the turnbuckle at the Bell Centre in March, any recent thawing of relations went out the window. The hit - resulting in a fractured C4 vertebra for the Hab youngster - reverberated not just around the Bell Centre boards but the NHL, prompting calls for new concussion protocols and to protect the head. It was announced Chara would be investigated by the Montreal Police department, but thte SPVM is yet to draw any conclusions. In the midst of a controversial year, the Habs won the season-series 4-2 but lost the Division to their rivals.

What's amusing (and mildly surprising) is that similarities between the cities don't just end with their hometowns. Both clubs rely on their Vezina trophy-nominated goaltenders (Carey Price and Tim Thomas) and both clubs have a fleet of busy skaters, rather than sublimely-skilled ones: Montreal will pit Mike Cammalleri, Brian Gionta and Thomas Plekanec against a (probably slightly better) Bruin forward core of Milan Lucic, Nathan Horton and Patrice Bergeron. Both sides have strength in depth, rather than in superstars. The Bruins' don't counterpunch like the Habs, but that's a result of yet more injuries to Hab defencemen. While not a vintage year for either squad, this could be each team's most successful playoff run for nearly two decades. In the words of the Highlander - there can be only one.

It could be that - good-looking women apart - the cities are rivals not just because of their clashes during the 1970s and before, but because each city was the jewel in their country's crown until recent times. There are a lot of similarities between both cities: a working-class city dotted with pockets of "old money"; a history of sporting success; decreasing global importance and the fans' appreciation for hard work and spunk. Boston and Montreal will continue to fight it out on the ice.

And, as fans, we love it.