DETROIT — It was disgusting and it nearly made me sick.
In today’s NHL there should be no room for the kind of wanton violence we witnessed in Wednesday night’s Washington Capitals-New York Rangers game that was shown nationally on NBCSN.
And it’s all the fault of league officials, and specifically of George Parros, a one-time enforcer who’s comically in charge of the NHL’s department of player safety.
Look, I’m a hockey fan. I love the sport and I grew up on it. And I never minded the fights. In fact, I still believe they serve the purpose of allowing players to police themselves through frontier justice. You hurt one of ours, we hurt one of yours.
But what happened Wednesday at Madison Square Garden was an atrocity and an embarrassment for the sport. It took just one second for a line fight between three pairs of players to break out as the matchup turned into a blood sport that lasted the whole night.
The game ended with 141 penalty minutes and a list of so many infractions that they wouldn’t fit on an elongated CVS receipt. Fighting. Misconducts. Tripping. Slashing. High-sticking. On and on.
It all stemmed from an ugly incident Monday night in which Capitals tough guy Tom Wilson — a talented goon, but still a goon who checks in at 6 feet 4 and 220 pounds — touched off a melee. Wilson hit defenseless Pavel Buchnevich on the ice, then slammed Artemi Panarin, who is 5-11 and 168 pounds, face first into the ice while he wasn’t wearing a helmet.
If you don’t know, Wilson violated a code of honor in hockey in which players are only supposed to take on opponents of their approximate size.
Panarin was hurt and the Rangers said he would miss the season’s final three games. Wilson, a notorious cheap-shot artist with 1,111 career penalty minutes, was not suspended and fined the absurdly low amount of $5,000. This was Parros’ call and it deserved the response it got from the Rangers, who took the extreme measure of publicly calling for his firing on a Twitter post that got over 83,000 likes.
The Rangers went after Wilson during his first shift Wednesday, when former Red Wing Brendan Smith found him in 50 seconds into the game as they went at it.
“I thought that it should have been handled before this game and it wasn't,” Smith said of Wilson’s punishment, “so unfortunately, it had to be on my shoulders, and I took it.”
The teams did what they had to do because the league failed to do what it was supposed to do. The players pummeled each other on the ice, but it was the NHL that ultimately ended up with the black eye Wednesday.
And on Thursday, the NHL levied a $250,000 fine against the Rangers for ... public comments they made on Tuesday.
NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement that "it is terribly unfair to question George Parros’ professionalism and dedication to his role and the Department of Player Safety."
As the league tries to move back into the mainstream by returning to ESPN next season after nearly a 20-year absence, this kind of maniacal violence harkens back to the sport’s darker, brutal days and will stunt hockey's growth by discouraging new fans from watching.
The only person the Rangers would have probably gone after more lustily than Wilson would have been Parros, if he had been on the ice. He could have avoided the whole thing by suspending Wilson at least one game since Wednesday was the season’s final meeting between the teams.
Maybe the suspension would have appeased the Rangers, but maybe not. As we know in Detroit, Claude Lemieux’s two-game suspension for his cowardly savage hit on Kris Draper in 1996 was far from adequate for the Red Wings.
This is why I watched Wednesday’s game. I was curious to see how the Rangers would react. Would it be a simple showdown between Wilson and the Rangers’ best fighter? Or would it turn into a Wings-Avalanche brawl?
I had no idea it would turn into the final scene of “Slap Shot.” The only things missing were the Hanson brothers, Tim “Dr. Hook” McCracken and an on-ice striptease. (Although life certainly imitated art because the Caps-Rangers game looked like a screenplay sideshow, complete with pregame ownership shenanigans and management strife).
I felt sorry for Rangers players Wednesday night because it must have felt like they were getting it from all sides: Wilson, the league, ownership. Half the time they were throwing punches, they probably weren’t even sure who the real enemy was.
