Canadiens notebook: Myers decision highlights flaw in suspension process

MONTREAL — Here’s a text I received from a current player — not a Montreal Canadien — who felt Tyler Myers’s hit, which concussed Joel Armia with 2:28 remaining in Thursday’s 7-3 Canucks loss, was worthy of a suspension from the NHL’s Department of Player Safety: “The hit was unnecessary. Myers blindsided him. Armia was vulnerable. Even if he didn’t hit him in the head, he should get a game or two.”

The DoPS announced late on Friday Myers wasn’t getting any games. Not even a fine.

I know that outrages the Canadiens — and their fans, many of whom flooded my Twitter mentions over the last 24 hours to express as much, some of them in the most colourful language imaginable and most of them with the same gripe as this player.

Canadiens coach Claude Julien pled his case for a suspension after Thursday’s game and, in doing so, pre-emptively outlined the other reason all these people didn’t end up liking the decision to not suspend Myers.

“I didn’t like the hit—especially with 2:28 to go in a 6-3 game,” Julien said.

I don’t blame him, or anyone else, for feeling this way. It’s garbage-time in the second game of a three-game series between the Canucks and his Canadiens, and as the player who texted me Friday put it, “the hit was unnecessary.”

I agree on that.

But everyone upset about it needs to realize that their anger should be directed at the way the rules are written, not how they’re applied by the DoPS, which decides whether or not a player should be suspended purely on legality of a play and nothing else. All the context — the situation of the game and the hit coming on an unsuspecting player from the “blindside,” doesn’t get factored in until the DoPS decides the hit violated a rule. A judge can’t sentence someone for a crime they haven’t been convicted of, and this is just like that.

In this case, the rule the DoPS was looking at to determine whether supplementary discipline was warranted was Rule 48, which stipulates that “a hit resulting in contact with an opponent’s head where the head was the main point of contact and such contact to the head was avoidable is not permitted.”

The DoPS provides in its video explanation replay angles that clearly show that Myers first made contact with Armia’s chest and body, and that the head is not the main point of contact. And even though the DoPS acknowledges there was “head contact on the hit,” it explains in detail how it arrived at the conclusion the head is not the main point of contact.

“On most plays where the head is the main point of contact, we see the head moving independently in the same direction as the player’s body,” the DoPS video states. “That head snap, as we have previously described it, is an excellent indicator that the head has absorbed more force than the rest of the body.”

But the DoPS judges that Armia’s head isn’t the main point of contact because a) they can see it’s his chest in the video and b) because his head doesn’t snap back independently in the same direction as his body.

Unlike this hit from Vegas’s Ryan Reaves on Vancouver’s Tyler Motte, which clearly is an illegal check to the head with the head as the main point of contact and the head snapping back independently to offer confirmation of the fact:

One last thing on the Myers-Armia hit: When I watched it in real-time and then again on one of the replay angles, I felt Myers unnecessarily thrusted upwards to deliver the hit. But the DoPS, armed with several other angles to review from, explains why it judged that wasn’t the case.

“On almost every body check, the player’s natural hitting motion involves some measure of upward momentum into the hit, which is allowable provided it is not excessive,” the DoPS says before finally concluding, “This is a legal, full body check with an unfortunate end result.”

What’s unfortunate to me, aside from Armia being concussed, is that the DoPS doesn’t have the leeway to venture into the gray zone of all the context around this hit to make its decision on whether or not it’s a suspension-worthy offence. Because it’s patently obvious, based on all that context, that it’s a dirty play and the exact type of play the league should want to remove from the game — even if they want to keep legal body checks in the game.

But with the rules being what they are, Armia being unsuspecting, Myers “blindsiding” him and this happening under the game-circumstances outlined above isn’t considered by the DoPS to determine the legality of the hit. Again, the DoPS goes by the book — black and white, no gray — and none of this stuff is written in the book.

Where all that stuff comes into play is if and when the DoPS decides an illegal check to the head was made. Once the distinction is made that a rule has been broken, the game circumstances, the predatory nature of the hit, Armia’s vulnerability, the injury caused and the offender’s suspension history all factor into how severe the punishment should be.

Don’t like the process? Change the rules.

But the tweets and rants admonishing George Parros and all the others who work under his supervision on the disciplinary committee are misplaced here. Parros and co. are the judge in this scenario, and judges don’t lock people up unless they’ve been charged and found guilty of breaking the law.

If you want to change the law, petition the general managers and the NHL’s competition committee to amend the rules and give the DoPS more leeway to apply them while taking more than just the letter of the law into consideration.

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You have to think that with Myers in Vancouver’s lineup for Game 3 with Montreal Saturday, the potential for fireworks is sky high.

“Before that incident even happened, we talked about it being a possibility that when you play teams consecutively, two-three games in a row, there’s going to be bad blood that’s going to happen along the way,” said Julien on Friday. “This is not the first, and it won’t be the last of these kind of things happening, and it’s up to each team to deal with it the way they see fit. Go ahead and do what you have to do.”

Enter Corey Perry.

The six-foot-three menace has been waiting on Montreal’s taxi squad for a chance to play, and he’s coming in for Armia for the type of game he’s made for.

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Not that Perry has to address things with Myers. They have Josh Anderson, Joel Edmundson, Ben Chiarot and Shea Weber, who can all fight, if it comes down to that.

Beyond fighting, expect the Canadiens to keep up the physical game they’ve displayed so far, perhaps even ratchet it up a level.

But also keep in mind that the Canadiens play the Canucks six more times after Saturday’s game, including twice in Montreal in early February. So, there’s no guarantee of anything blowing up right away.

As Julien noted, “For us, the most important thing (Saturday) is we need to win a hockey game. That’s what we want to do here. So, what the league decided we can’t control. We control how we perform (Saturday) and that’s all we can focus on right now.”

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What Canadiens want to do better is…

Tighten up defensively.

I asked Julien to expand on that Friday.

“Sometimes it’s not so much about stopping the plays or killing the plays, but even coming out of our own end and some better support and all that stuff,” the coach replied. “The other thing, too, is we can do a better job of collapsing. We’ve given some quality chances from the slot area and I think our forwards can do a better job here being aware that sometimes we get caught watching the Ds to worry about the back end and not taking care of what we call ‘the House Area.’

“That’s an adjustment there with a lot of new players that we have to get them to focus on a bit better.”

Expect Vancouver’s best

Even without Alex Edler and Travis Hamonic, and for a team depending on very inexperienced defencemen, you have to know the Canucks are going to play a much tighter game to start reversing their 2-4-0 start to the season.

Especially when coach Travis Green said this after Thursday’s blowout loss:

“We weren’t just giving up scoring chances, we were giving up goals. We gift-wrapped probably four or five goals. It wasn’t a game where we were hemmed in our zone… it was just giving up breakaways. In this league, if you give up chances that are gifts, you’re going to lose bad.”

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