Bowing to public pressure, the likes of which it has rarely seen, the National Hockey League came down hard on Vancouver Canucks' Todd Bertuzzi Thursday morning, suspending him for the team's remaining 12 regular-season games plus the rest of the playoffs as a result of a premeditated sucker-punch that left his victim, Colorado Avalanche forward Steve Moore, in the hospital with a broken neck.
Nor did Colin Campbell, the NHL's senior vice president and director of hockey operations, mince words when handing down his decision.
Bertuzzi, according to Campbell, far exceeded the limits of what could be reasonably tolerated by the league. Moreover, the terms of Bertuzzi's suspension will require him to reapply to NHL commissioner Gary Bettman for reinstatement in the NHL prior to the start of next season, which is how they handled the equally famous, equally heinous, Marty McSorley-Donald Brashear incident four years ago.
The only significant difference between the two penalties was that McSorley, an aging enforcer at the end of his career, never played another NHL game. Bertuzzi, meanwhile, remains one of the NHL's top players - a top-five scorer in each of the past two seasons - and he will be welcomed back by the Canucks as soon as he eligible to return.
This, it must be said, represents a significant penalty by NHL standards - against both Bertuzzi and against the team, which was fined $250,000 and also reprimanded by Campbell for not doing enough to ensure a the players kept "a proper focus" on the game itself.
"We believe that more could have and should have been done."
Bertuzzi's absence from the line-up will unquestionably damage the Canucks' playoff chances. They are currently fourth in the Western Conference standings and entertained thoughts of challenging for the Stanley Cup this season. Without Bertuzzi, they will be obliged to compete without one of their key heart-and-soul players, someone who along with team captain Markus Naslund and defenceman Ed Jovanovski, make up their leadership group.
Campbell, the league's chief disciplinarian, was forced to play Solomon in handing down his verdict and came up with a workable compromise, between the two ends of the philosophical spectrum.
On the one side, there were the unabashed backers of Bertuzzi, the ones who held up signs in support of him at Wednesday night's game at GM Place and who were prepared to dismiss his suckerpunch as part of the "boys-will-be-boys" mentality prevalent at the NHL level. In their minds, the Bertuzzi assault on Moore was no different than half-a-dozen other incidents that occurred this season and would have been quickly forgotten had there been no talk of a "bounty" in the days leading up to the Colorado-Vancouver game or if Moore had escaped serious injury.
On the other side, there were the critics of the NHL who saw Bertuzzi's attack as part of an unwritten "code" of revenge that exists in the NHL, which obliged someone on the Canucks to extract their pound of flesh from Moore. Moore had put Naslund in the hospital with a concussion some three weeks earlier as a result of an unpenalized hit to the head of the Vancouver captain, a check the league deemed was legal. In their minds, no penalty short of meaningful jail time would have been enough for what Bertuzzi did.
The resulting compromise was a strong penalty by NHL standards and may just signal the start of Bertuzzi's problems. The league was first off the mark, in assessing discipline for an incident that has been front-page news all week and galvanized the growing debate over violence in hockey.
The criminal courts could be next in line, depending upon the results of a Vancouver police investigation into the incident. Ultimately, there could also be a civil action against Bertuzzi by the Moore family, if the injuries he suffered in the attack undermine his NHL career in any way.
Depending upon how deep the Canucks go into the playoffs, the Bertuzzi suspension could turn into the longest in NHL history. McSorley effectively received a 23-game suspension for swinging his stick, baseball-style, at the head of the Vancouver Canucks' Donald Brashear. Coincidentally, both incidents took place at Vancouver's GM Place.
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