Hello boys and girls, welcome back to another installment of my blog series following the Boston Bruins season. This week, rather than talking about the games the Bruins played this past week I would like to take the opportunity to discuss and share my feelings on a play that happened earlier this week during the Bruins and Canucks Saturday night game. Near the end of the third period as the Bruins gained possession and skated out of the zone Canucks left wing Brandon Prust skate up to Bruins left wing Brad Marchand and speared him in the groin with the blade of his stick. Marchand had to be helped up by the trainer but was able to skate off under his own power. Prust was given a ten minute misconduct, essentially ejecting him from the game. Later on that week the NHL Department of Player Safety fined Prust 5,000 dollars yet did not suspend him. After a week of readin response posts around the internet and doing some thinking of my own I wanted to share my opinion of the play and the overall effectiveness of the DoPS.
To put it bluntly, I feel the way the NHL handled this was completely unacceptable. The play itself is extremely dangerous due to the fact that, other than your standard athletic cup, there is little padding in that area to protect from odd angle bumps and hits. Combine that with the speed and power that NHL caliber players are able to handle their sticks, it is all to easy for someone to badly injure another player in one swift motion. Taking that into account, I applaud the referees for at least handing out a misconduct penalty to Prust although I feel there should also have been a 5 minute major penalty for spearing assessed as well. I understand why there was not in this case though as the event happened away from the play and I don't believe any of the referees saw the incident play out in real time. Where the NHL completely dropped the ball was when it came to handing out supplementary discipline. As stated before the DoPS decided to only assess a fine of 5000 dollars to Prust, which is a measly 0.2% of his current 2.5 million dollar annual salary. Prust took to twitter after the fine was assigned, referring to the fine as the "best money I ever spent". All of this put together makes it pretty obvious that the DoPS failed to do their job of enforcing the rules that are supposed to keep players safe. This is not the first time the DoPS has had trouble with punishing spearing in the league. A couple years ago, Milan Lucic committed a similar act against the Red Wings Danny Dekeyser in the playoffs and was similarly fined 5000 dollars with no other supplementary discipline. In my personal opinion, due to how egregious and dangerous these incidents can potentially be, there should be a minimum fine in place of at least 25000 dollars as well as a one game suspension. Only with harsh punishments will we see this gutless play removed from players repertoires which can only be a good thing in a league already struggling with dealing hits to the head and slew footing. If there is one thing about the league that I wish was more consistent it would be how the DoPS deals with protecting the players that play this magnificent game and punishing those who take liberties with the rules that are there to ensure player safety as well as the integrity of the sport as a whole.
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