The Memory Remains

The repercussions of March 8, 2004 just will not go away. More so than the effects of the 2004-2005 season's cancellation, the Bertuzzi-Moore affair is the NHL's true elephant in the room. The saga continues with more legal wrangling and protracted visits to the league office:

20 games in exchange for a career

My stance on a few matters relating to the incident can be summed up within the boundaries of a few questions which keep repeating themselves:

Yes, I think it was a cowardly act by Bertuzzi, grabbing Moore from behind and using his full force to slam the player face-first into the ice. Even in the goon's code, you have to at least tap a player on the shoulder when his back is turned, in order to engage properly.

No, I don't think there should have been legal repercussions beyond the league's involvement. It was not the place for Vancouver city or Provincial police to begin an investigation if Moore did not specifically ask for it first. However, I do see that in the league's inability to pass down a proper verdict, courtroom justice had to be sought.

Yes, I think it was very weird how the Avalanche signed Brad May, whose actions in that game (going after Sakic and Forsberg as the chosen player to retaliate for Moore's hit on Canucks captain Markus Naslund the month before) preceded Bertuzzi's thuggery. I find it even stranger that the players' unwritten code allowed for all to be forgiven when May played a full season in Denver last year, while Moore remained a distant, litigious afterthought.

No, I don't think Bertuzzi "suffered enough" for his actions. Dale Hunter once cross-checked Pierre Turgeon from behind and dislocated Turgeon's shoulder in a 1993 Capitals-Islanders playoff game, and he got a league-record 25-gamer to start the following season. Turgeon rehabbed and only missed a handful of games the next year.

Moore, on the other hand, was bloodied and knocked unconscious by the hit, and, almost three years later is still dealing with the concussions and other physical symptoms of the attack. He will never get another team to sign him, since, as the weeks and months pass by, the effort he would need to return to playing shape will leave him ever more out of sync with the different demands of the new NHL. Justifying the fact that Bertuzzi had 13 games, the playoffs, and the cancelled season to not play, and to wrestle with his responsibility in addition to his actual suspension is a shoddy argument at best. Redemption should not have come this easily. Sure, Bertuzzi is psychologically not the same player he was before the incident, even with new surroundings in South Florida, but so what? Bertuzzi continues to earn his living while Moore cannot.

It's a curious contradiction in the Bettman era, and the hit has become a nexus point for discussion of just where The Commissioner wanted to point the league in the new era. On the one hand, the suspension was handed down, but it seems more like a pale compromise than what it should have been: a landmark attempt for Bettman to lay down the law regarding violence in the sport. Instead, he looks at the Flyers-Ottawa brawl, and recounts nightmares from Buffalo in the mid-90's, and decides to create a rule which suspends anyone caught in a fight in the last five minutes of a regular-season game, and another one which brings the hammer down if someone's jersey happens to pop off his pants during a fight.

Even a trained lawyer like Bettman can see the logic in the separation between the traditional rules of fighting, and the brutality of random violence. So far this season, there have been plenty of behind-the-back hits in vulnerable positions, resulting in the most benign of disadvantages, the two-minute minor. I watched a Washington-Pittsburgh game on Tuesday night, and two combatants were given game misconducts because they dared to start a fight away from the main attraction which the officials were watching closely - no kicking, no gouging, no shirts torn off, no turtling, just a tussle in the faceoff circle. And yet, there's endless Hamlet-like hand-wringing and indecision on what to do with all these "big hits" that may or may not happen via elbows to the head. There's subtle discussions about the psychology of players refusing to wear visors when the issue should be why there aren't more double-minors and majors handed out after ever-increasingly careless stickwork. It's all a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees.

Meanwhile, there seems to be some confusion about who should settle this $19.5 million civil suit Moore brought against Bertuzzi. Why are they meeting with the league instead of having the reps meet with each other? As far as I know, once the courts are involved, the league has no say in the matter, it's up to the lawyers to sort it all out, unless the punishment levelled by the league office somehow factors into the eventual settlement amount.

All of this could have been avoided had the NHL taken appropriate action. I'm certain that Moore wouldn't have gone the painstaking route he did, had justice been meted out properly by the appropriate source. The continuing tragedy beyond corporeal effects, is the molasses-like movement of the legal system in both the U.S. and Canada. Both men are in it for the long haul now, but no matter what the outcome, it still won't truly satisfy anyone.