How the NHL hands down suspensions to curb dirty hits

The NHL’s Department of Player Safety made a decision on Wednesday to hand St. Louis Blues winger Ryan Reaves a three-game suspension for boarding Matt Tennyson of the San Jose Sharks.

The hit was one of the scariest  of the season. Reaves checked Tennyson from behind hard into the boards, sending the San Jose defenseman falling straight backward in a knocked-out heap. \

After the game, Sharks head coach Peter DeBoer told the media that, “Those are the kind of hits we’re trying to get rid of.”

It’s an issue that gets talked about at great length every season now. The increased knowledge about the toll taken on players’ health has prompted the league to up its policies. There are always those, of course, who continue to say that the NHL isn’t doing enough in the way of eliminating this type of play or don’t agree with how punishment is handed down from the NHLPA. (Sharks fans took to Twitter to voice their displeasure that Reaves’ suspension wasn’t longer, for example.)

It’s an odd balancing act, taking a part of the game that garners highlight reels and counts as a stat — and fantasy points — and creating parameters around it that help keep the players safer. The NHL has been trying to make the game safer. The system is far from perfect, but is the league at least starting to get it right?

Suspensions handed down for hits in the NHL have evolved over the last few seasons, especially with new information that has risen over the last few years regarding concussions and their aftermath. It has led to a more in-depth look at hits, which has also led to lengthy punishments. The league certainly showed its stance on checks to the head when it suspended Raffi Torres for 41 games before the regular season even started.

Of course, the punishment system in place for hits still isn’t a bug-free system. There has certainly been some player-on-player crime this season that hasn’t so much as gotten a penalty, let alone a hearing with the Department of Player Safety. For instance, a few games back, P.K. Subban's high hit on Claude Giroux went unpenalized both on the ice and after. Also, at the beginning of the season, Dustin Brown clearly head-butted Logan Couture right in the face but got away unscathed.

An SB Nation piece argued that punishments aren’t being determined by the hits themselves, but by their aftermath. The article references the recent stadium series game between the Blackhawks and the Wild, in which Michal Rozsival drilled Jason Zucker. The hit by Rozsival didn’t appear to be malicious, but the referees had to stop play when Zucker laid in pain on the ice. He was just this Wednesday placed on injured reserve due to a concussion.

Rozsival received a five-minute major and was ejected from the game. (Although it was later reported that he would “not face any supplemental discipline.”) Author of the piece Adam Hess wrote:

… the NHL is clearly less interested in the manner of the hit and more interested in its result. This is nothing new. We have been seeing longer suspensions for hits that result injuries for years now. 

However, it doesn't make it any less wrong. Clean hits are not dirtier because they result injury, and dirty hits are not cleaner because they don't.

This idea that the result of the hit is a bigger factor than the hit itself is congruent with a CBS Sports piece on a three-game suspension handed down to Edmonton’s Matt Hendricks. In explaining his three-game suspension for boarding Florida’s Aaron Ekblad during a contest back in January, writer Adam Gretz said: “Whether or not a player is injured is a factor in supplemental discipline the NHL hands out on hits like this.”

That brings us back to the hit Reaves laid on Tennyson and the subsequent three-game suspension. Watching video of both incidences, Reaves’ hit on Tennyson is incredibly similar to Hendricks' hit on Ekblad. The 19-year-old Panthers defenseman missed four games, while the jury is still out on how long Tennyson might be sidelined.

The next question is probably whether or not  a three-game punishment for four games sidelined with a concussion — not to mention any lingering side effects — is the right call. Perhaps that's the next step in the league evolving its policies when addressing hits like this.