Hockey Goons: Dinosaurs Of The '80s

This is Harvard hockey's second weekend at home.

And if you're a hockey purist, you'll be in high heaven. You'll see cross-ice passing, speed, good defense and clean body checks.

Unfortunately, if you go to the Garden to watch a Boston Bruins game, you're going to see a game resembling roller derby and professional wrestling on ice.

Anybody who has seen the Dave Brown incident, the Billy Smith incident, the Ron Hextall incident, and even the Tom Lysiak incident knows that violence in the NHL is prevalent.

Though the NHL has spawned its brightest stars--Wayne Gretzky. Mike Bossy and Mario Lemieux--in the past 10 years, the excessive violence has not stopped.

You see, an arms race has been going on in the NHL. The arms are goons hired to fight an enemy enforcer. In the Norris division alone, all five teams got new enforcers in the same calendar week.

But people like Dave Semenko, Brown, Ed Hospodar and Chris Nilan are fast becoming dinosaurs in the NHL. The silent majority of fans who want to watch goal-scoring instead of fisticuffs know it. Coaches who knowingly keep a defensive liability on their roster are being burned.

Out of Control

After all, goons are buffoons when it comes to playing today's brand of hockey. This was shown in the last two Stanley Cup playoff series, when the participants' designated enforcers made bonehead plays that lost deciding games for their teams.

1986:Game 7 of the Stanley Cup semi-finals between the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames. With less than two minutes left in regulation and the score tied. Steve Smith picked up the puck behind his own goal. Smith was Edmonton's enforcer, a weak link on an Oiler team that was arguably the most potent offensive force in the history of the game.

Smith attempted a pass out from behind the net and banked the puck off the back of Grant Fuhr's leg for a Calgary goal. The greatest machine in hockey, derailed by the misplay of a goon.

1987:Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final between the Philadelphia Flyers and the Edmonton Oilers. The Flyers had scored in the first two minutes of play and had the momentum. But late in the first period, Dave Brown's line went out onto the ice. Edmonton Coach Glenn Sather, exercising the home team's right of the last line change, sent out a line of Mark Messier, Kent Nilsson and Glenn Anderson, the team's fastest trio.

Oh, No

Not long into the shift, the three fleet forwards got a three-on-one breakaway with Brown back. Edmonton picked Brown apart with crisp passes, and scored. The Oilers capitalized on the sudden change in momentum and eventually won the game.

These instances show what a liability a goon can be to a team. But goons as a whole are a liability to the NHL. The league's image is tarnished when a particularly vicious cheap shot is leveled against a defenseless player.

Seventh Heaven

At least seven suspensions have been handed out this year for flagrant fouls. But suspensions may not head off the worst-case scenario: death.

What if somebody is killed during play? It's possible. More and more beef is flying around faster and faster. Players get meaner and meaner. The escalation may result in an incident in which one player will never get up.

Perhaps the NHL powers-that-be will realize that while enforcers are around. NHL play will always be inferior to that of any other league in the world.

After all, how did a rag-tag bunch of college hockey players defeat the Soviets in 1980 when the NHL. All-Stars couldn't?