Of the four major American sports, hockey is easily the least popular. Canadians and certain regions in America take it seriously, but for the most part Americans either don't watch hockey at all or only watch it between the NFL and MLB seasons.
However, I think something needs to be said for the NHL that nobody wants to admit.
Fans of football often praise the physical play in the NFL. Teams brag about having hard-hitting defenses and playing smashmouth football. However, the league has been getting progressively less physical year after year.
In hockey, that is not the case. If a hockey player gets praised for being a hard hitter, it's because he's a hard hitter, not because the new rules make him look great when compared to his peers.
Let's take a look at the track record of the two leagues:
Before the 1970s, the NFL allowed full contact coverage of wide receivers. Anything short of tackling the receiver before the ball touched him was not considered pass interference. Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steelers safety Mel Blount took full advantage of this rule, to the point that the league instituted newer, stricter rules on defenders so that receivers wouldn't get hurt. The rule prevented Blount from basically brutalizing every receiver as they ran their route and became known as the Mel Blount rule.
The NFL has rules for roughing the passer and roughing the kicker. Understandable, sure, because when the quarterback has already released the ball there's no longer any reason to plant his face into the dirt. However, we've seen these penalties be called more and more excessively in the past years.
The NFL even has a rule for RUNNING INTO the kicker. Nobody can touch the kicker at all, even accidentally. The kicker is a delicate flower who must not be trampled upon.
Going back to the Steelers, receiver Hines Ward was fined multiple times last year for blocks he threw in a game, even when no penalty flag was thrown. Teammate Troy Polamalu famously responded by saying the NFL "is becoming a pansy league."
This year, the NFL instituted a rule making it illegal for receivers to throw crackback blocks on defenders. So, something a corner is trained to watch out for from Pop Warner all the way up to the NCAA level will no longer be important once they reach the highest level of play, because the NFL doesn't want their big, scary defenders getting shown up by physical wide receivers like Ward.
More famously, of course, the NFL instituted what has come to be known as the Tom Brady rule, where a defender cannot tackle a QB after being blocked to the ground unless he stands back up before making the tackle.
Or, to put it another way: offensive linemen will now be throwing defenders to the ground every down, because it's illegal for them to hit the QB now without standing back up and asking "mother may I sack the quarterback?"
I think Polamalu may have been on to something.
Now, let's contrast this with the NHL.
NHL players are routinely checked into glass walls. This isn't illegal, and in fact is encouraged as a good play.
This year, the NHL debated on whether or not it should make it illegal for players to target one another's heads when checking them. Fearing concussions of the players, the league considered cracking down on headhunters in the NHL...and decided AGAINST it.
Up until recently, icing was called whenever a player hit the puck from his team's zone across the ice into another team's zone without scoring a goal. Recently, the NHL modified this rule so that a player from the other team besides the goalie would have to touch the puck with his stick before icing is called.
This is different from international "no touch" icing and results in MORE physical play in the NHL from players racing to be the first to touch the puck.
The NHL not only has fighting, they both allow it and have a section of the rule book governing it. If an NFL player so much as throws a punch, they'll be fined at the least and probably suspended for multiple games.
Despite the reputation of the NFL as a physical league, it's done more and more each year to downplay the importance of physical football, while the NHL has done more and more to make physical defense an integral part of hockey.
So, if nobody else will say it, I will: The NHL is the most physical of the major sports. After the addition of the Brady rule, I'm not so sure the NFL is even a close second.
Monday, March 30, 2009
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15 comments:
Welcome to the world that is Hockey. I couldn't agree with you more.
Also, Americans do watch hockey, especially the ones that grow up in hockey-crazy small towns in the states of Minnesota, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and Michigan.
EDIT: such as myself.
Also, if you want even more physical hockey than the NHL (and arguably faster), check out the 2009 NCAA Frozen Four next Thursday, April 9th; on ESPN 2 (games at 5:30 and 8:30 PM EST I believe).
The college game is so pure, much like NFL to college football.
Plus the fact that hockey players are constantly flying everywhere, hitting and being hit and keep right on going. It's part of the game, the flow.
The NFL on the other hand is "physical" in spurts. The offense and defense line up, the QB hikes the ball, the lines collide, the receivers run and catch the ball or the RB runs it, they get hit and go down, and the play is DONE. Everything stops until the QB hikes the ball again. The game's in spurts.
Not to mention the fact that NFL players can be on the ground after injury for a long long time and minor injuries usual keep them out for games.
Unless a hockey player is dieing (okay maybe a little bit of an exaggeration) they keep playing until they can make it to the bench or get to the bench immediately so someone else can get on the ice and defend. There aren't many injuries that would keep any normal hockey player from stopping to play for any extended period. In youth leagues it's amazing how many times I've seen this scenario: kid gets injured (nothing too serious obviously) and the coach or ref comes over after the whistle and tells the player to "get up, you're a hockey player." The kid 99 times out of 100 will get right up or try to and skate to the bench.
Different mentality.
That's why I love hockey better than football (even though I do enjoy a good football game, don't get me wrong).
Great read, could not agree more. One small note though, the NHL has always had touch-up icing. Other than that, I agree whole heartedly with everything you mentioned and hope hockey starts getting a lot more attention
So you're argument (I know nothing about football) is that these new rules, the ones that prevent injuries, are bad, but the NHL allowing intentional injuring of a player with a head hit is a good thing?
Maybe I don't understand you. Maybe you didn't just say that violence for the sake of violence was a good thing. Or for the sake of hurting people.
I mean, I'm not saying that toughness is a bad thing, I'm just saying that rules that prevent injuries are good, because injuries are a bad thing.
The hatred of hockey is something that I've never understood at all. It's the best qualities of every other popular sport in one place and often at a better level. The physicality and speed of football, but constant. The passing, movement and action of basketball and soccer but at a faster level and more reliant on teamwork. (Most of the time.) The idiotic commissioner of baseball but... ok, they're probably very close.
Is it just because it's played on ice?
Icing has been that way in the NHL for several decades, but A for effort
"Not to mention the fact that NFL players can be on the ground after injury for a long long time and minor injuries usual keep them out for games.
Unless a hockey player is dieing (okay maybe a little bit of an exaggeration) they keep playing until they can make it to the bench or get to the bench immediately so someone else can get on the ice and defend. There aren't many injuries that would keep any normal hockey player from stopping to play for any extended period. In youth leagues it's amazing how many times I've seen this scenario: kid gets injured (nothing too serious obviously) and the coach or ref comes over after the whistle and tells the player to "get up, you're a hockey player." The kid 99 times out of 100 will get right up or try to and skate to the bench..."
And even then...remember the incident with Richard Zednik last year? I've seen football players rolling around on the field for ten minutes only to find out later that his leg cramped up, while Zednik got up and raced to the bench after getting his throat slashed with a skate. And even then, the play didn't stop until he was halfway to the bench and the referees saw the trail of blood he was leaving...
When it comes to toughness, hockey beats football, hands down. And this is coming from a former high school football player, too.
Great analysis and comparsion. Both are entertaining but hockey is way more physical.
On the icing question - didn't the NHL experiment with "no-touch icing" a few years ago? That is, if the puck crossed the goal line after being sent in from behind center red, the play was whistled down, regardless of whether a defender other than the goalie touched it or not???
@gpclay: Yeah, I'm pretty sure they had a no-touch experiment a few years ago and decided not to keep it, so I suppose my post should read "changed back."
@Corey: I'm not saying that rules to prevent injuries are bad. I don't think a player should be able to dive at a quarterback's knees with intent to injure, but that was already a rule in the NFL.
What happened to Tom Brady last year happens to several NFL players every year. The defender went to the ground, and while he was down there, he grabbed Brady's leg to make a tackle. It's a smart play. Brady's leg just happened to be in the wrong position and after he fell, he was injured badly. However, the vast majority of the time a play like that happens, the only result is a loss of yards and a sack in the stats. I don't think we should be changing rules based on a single injury.
@Nate
I'm pretty sure they've never experimented with it in the NHL. At least not in recent history. They've discussed it at the NHL level, and may have used it at the AHL level (which is where they generally try out all rule changes, although I don't recall them implementing no touch there either). I've never seen an NHL game with no touch icing that I can recall in 20 years of watching NHL hockey though, and looking through the internet I can't find any record of it either (though I did find several articles from the past 5 years as to when they decided NOT to go to no-touch icing).
@Corey
It's a physical sport, and there's always a balance between physicality and injury risk. If the only goal were eliminating injuries, then they would make it non-contact.
FYI, I got into an argument with a friend at work once because he didn't believe me about the physicality of hockey. Checking through the injury lists for hockey vs. football, we found that very nearly the exact same percentage of players were injured on a hockey team as a football team at any given point in time (slight edge to hockey).
The NHL did have no-touch icing for a short period of time in the late 90ies and early 2000s. They removed it again after the lock-out.
The only significant change to icing rules was decades ago. In the 1960s, if I'm not mistaken.
As for the headshots rules, there actually *are* rules against targeted shots to the head. The issue is that the rules aren't deterring shots to the head from being taken. After the death of Don Sanderson this past January, there will most likely be some more serious debate about fighting and shots to the head, and I don't think it's a bad thing. People don't want to see players' lives at risk, and rules against one kind of shot in the game isn't going to make hockey any less physical, it will just come out in different ways.
The CHL has pretty stringent rules against fighting (especially the OHL) as they should, since it's junior hockey and the players are KIDS (even if no 16-20 year old boy wants to be called a kid). But that didn't stop the Vancouver Giants from logging over 100 penalty minutes in two periods of play in a game this season. At least 19 of those minutes were by a player who is likely to go 4th overall to Atlanta next week in the draft.
Even without the fighting in the NHL, hockey is still the most physically strenuous professional sport with the possible exception of Champions League soccer. NFL teams play 16 regular season games. NHL teams play 82. That fact ALONE should be able to carry this debate. Nixing head shots isn't going to change that.
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