George Parros was in the house, you guys.
Yeah, he was up there witnessing, firsthand from the front row of PPG Paints Arena's press box, everything he'd just wrought.
This will sound like the subplot for some lame satire, but it's worth it, so bear with me: The man running the NHL's Department of Player Safety, was not so long ago a fighter in the league. Born in Washington County, raised in New Jersey, and bringing little more than a 6-foot-5 frame to the tool set, he somehow stumbled upon 18 goals over his 474 games while primarily punching his way to 169 fights and 1,092 penalty minutes.
He even had a tough guy's nickname, "The 'Stache," for obvious reasons:
He'd have piled up more PIMs, too, if one of those fights hadn't caused a debilitating concussion in the fall of 2014 and forced his retirement a couple months later.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCOREYou'd think he'd have learned something.
You'd think they'd have learned something, meaning Gary Bettman, Bill Daly, Colin Campbell, the various generations of Burke-o-saurs and all the rest of the fossil faction in New York over Parros' head who never allow this beautiful sport to become fully embraced in our country.
But they don't learn. Maybe they're too simple. Or stubborn. Or stupid. Or maybe it's a hat trick there.
Now in his first season in charge of doling out discipline, Parros told the New York Times in an April 7 interview, “We hope we maintain a safe environment for the players. We hope we can affect the game in a positive manner and keep it safe.”
Safe?
Yeah, here's hoping that on this Tuesday night Parros enjoyed watching the Capitals' Tom Wilson, one of his peers in the tough guy fraternity that he'd just let wriggle off a hook, give Zach Aston-Reese a broken jaw that'll require surgery, as well as a concussion:
And here's hoping Parros equally enjoyed watching Wilson kicking out Olli Maatta's legs to spring the two-on-one that brought Washington's winner by Alexander Ovechkin with 1:07 remaining in Game 3 of this Stanley Cup playoff series:
Here's hoping Parros had a fresh tub of popcorn at hand.
Heck, here's hoping he had as much fun as the smirking, preening Wilson himself:
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"That guy," one of the Penguins' veterans was telling me afterward, "one of these days, he's going to get his."
When he does, Wilson will have had it coming. He's not a dirty player. He's filthy. He shouldn't even be connected in any way with fighting because, as anyone in the hockey community will attest, fighting in the sport has always been accompanied by a curious but very real sense of honor. This guy's nothing of the sort, and I don't just say that because he ducked a Jamie Oleksiak challenge on this night and that he hilariously ran away from Ryan Reaves earlier in the season.
He's nowhere near the 'honest player' he purported to be hours before faceoff.
He tries intentionally to injure other people in his occupation. He's Matt Cooke. Vontaze Burfict. A.J. Pierzynski. I'm talking about being willing — even hungry — to hurt someone in the course of competition. I'm talking about a place in organized sport where no athlete should aspire to be, never mind grin about it like a B-movie villain.
This, my friends, was a flagrantly illegal check, as we take more looks:
There isn't even an intelligent debate to be had on this one.
Is the head Wilson's principal point of contact?
Of course it is. One angle clearly shows that specific impact. And if video isn't enough, maybe a set of Aston-Reese's X-rays will suffice.
Did Wilson target the head?
Of course he did. Watch his skates and how he launches himself upward into the check. At 6-feet-4, he's already got 4 inches on Aston-Reese and, on top of that, Aston-Reese is arriving in a crouch. Wilson's got only one reason to be going upward, and he winds up launching with such force that he sends himself into the Capitals' bench, for crying out loud.
Still, just like Wilson's blindside head shot on Brian Dumoulin in Game 2 that was completely absolved by Parros, all four of the on-ice officials somehow missed this one, too.
Or did they?
It's easy to tell that linesman Greg Devorski had to leap up onto the boards to dodge the play and turn his back. He couldn't have seen it, and he's excused. But the two referees, Kevin Pollock and Francois St. Laurent, get no such pardon, and neither does the other linesman, Ryan Gibbons, since linesmen can call major penalties.
Then it got silly. Long after the act, though still in the same stoppage, all four gathered near the box to commiserate for nearly two minutes about a play that none of them, in the moment, had deemed a penalty.
What was that all about?
I asked Rob Rossi, chairman of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Professional Hockey Writers Association, if we could request a pool interview with anyone on the officiating crew to ask about that. They don't take questions on judgment calls, but they usually will if it's a rules interpretation. This request was accepted by Paul Devorski — Greg's older brother — the on-site supervisor of officials.
Devorski's reply in its entirety: "When we have a big hit like that, and there’s a lot of stuff going on on the ice, our guys come together. Because obviously both referees didn’t put their arm up, so obviously they didn’t think there was a penalty. So now they bring in the linesmen, who if they think it’s a major penalty, they’ll tell the referees. So they all got together and they said, ‘You know what, we’ve got a good, clean check here.’ "
Good God.
Never mind deeming that a "good, clean check." I'm not buying the meeting explanation, either.
Here's what I'll bet really happened: These four went back and forth in wondering what the hell had just happened, aware that Aston-Reese was seriously messed up and that they'd have to answer for it in some form. Eventually, all agreed that none of them really knew. And since the NHL doesn't allow for replay challenges of trivial matters like broken jaws and concussions, they couldn't ask Toronto for help. At which point ... eh, play on!
Hey, at least Devorski talked. Parros declined multiple media requests to be interviewed.
Mike Sullivan might as well have had flames emanating from his ears when this happened. But it might have been more telling that, afterward at the podium, he bucked two longstanding policies, first by revealing a player's injury in the playoffs — spelling out Aston-Reese's diagnosis unprovoked — and next by commenting on a controversial play.
"We lose a guy to a broken jaw that's going to require surgery, and a concussion, because of another high hit to the head," Sullivan would say. And note the willful insertion of 'another' in there. "At some point, we would hope that the league might do something."
That's a ton from him on such a topic. He thought that through.
Barry Trotz, who's anything but an innocent observer in all this, tried to avoid the topic when asked, then had to get a little testy to pull that off:
Wilson wasn't made available for comment. His teammates predictably supported him.
“He hits clean, he just hits hard,” Braden Holtby said. “I think today, for some reason, it’s frowned upon to hit people in hockey. But now he's taking the team's success and putting it in perspective and knowing that the refs are going to be looking to call anything ... I think he knows that. He’s a very intelligent player and very intelligent guy. I think he’s my type of player, for sure.”
He's that for all of them, I'm sure:
He definitely isn't from the Penguins' perspective, particularly as it related to Wilson laughing after the check when back on the bench.
"It's disrespectful," Justin Schultz said. "You know, a guy's hurt, laying on the ice ... it's not too good to be laughing at someone like that. But we'll move on here."
Kris Letang was most visibly vocal on the ice, screaming toward Wilson.
"It was more about the laughing part," Letang would explain. "I mean, I get the physical game. I get the physical play. I've been on the wrong side of it. At the end of the day, I respect the kind of game he plays. ... But you just don't laugh at somebody getting hurt. You just don't do that."
Most players answered like the captain.
"I don't really have anything to say," Sidney Crosby would say with a shake of the head. "What's there to say anymore?"
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Man, I hear that. I'm out of words for this garbage.
I'm grateful to have invested a big chunk of my lifetime in hockey. Most of it's been through covering the NHL since 1997 but, at infinitely lower levels, I've also played, refereed, kept time in the penalty box, sewn up torn nets ... you name it.
I love this game. But I loathe how this league is run, as brilliantly portrayed by our Chris Benson:
Occasionally, it feels OK to conceive, ever so cautiously, that things are improving. For example, scoring is up to 6.05 goals per game in these playoffs, and that's primarily due to the diligent enforcement against slashing and other stick fouls implemented last fall. Both have come with many benefits, not least of which has been a tiny but rare increase in national TV ratings.
But every time that toe gets tipped, it gets bitten. And that's because, at the root of this structure in the league office, there remains a stone-age mentality that sympathizes with the aggressors, one that worries first and foremost about being completely fair to those individuals rather than those ... you know, with broken jaws and concussions.
Don't believe it?
In that aforementioned interview with the Times, Parros remarked, “This is an interesting job. I don’t call it a fun job, because it’s not fun to take guys off the ice and dock their pay and tell GMs and everybody else they’re being held out. But it is an interesting job.”
That's his worry. He blurted it out right there: He doesn't find it fun suspending or fining people. And it's beyond telling that he doesn't mention what happens when he doesn't suspend or fine someone, and they go out two nights later and embarrass him, the NHL and the sport.
Maybe he will now.
Because Parros went to bat for Wilson after Game 2, first in looking the other way and then by Player Safety issuing a bizarre video that basically blamed Dumoulin for turning into a check he didn't see coming.
Boys will be boys, and in this case maybe, they're buds in a sense, too. Wilson acknowledged to D.C. reporters before these playoffs that he'd recently reached out to Player Safety for something of a clarification course on what he could and couldn't do as far as hitting people. This after having been hit for two suspensions totaling six games in the preseason last fall.
Stop right there. Imagine Crosby, Ovechkin or any actually important player reaching out to the league to discuss anything at all related to rules or enforcement. And then imagine, if word of that got out, how they'd be labeled by the hockey world as whiners and wusses. But Wilson does it, Parros obliges, and it's all wonderful because it's keeping the lines of communication clear toward cleaning up the game or something.
They sympathize with the aggressor.
When I analyze anything, in this job or in life, I prefer to look at causes and not symptoms. That's the cause.
Someone make sure The 'Stache has another good seat for Game 4. He'll be responsible for all the wreckage in that one, too.
MATT SUNDAY GALLERY
Penguins vs. Capitals, PPG Paints Arena, May 1, 2018. - MATT SUNDAY / DKPS