(Photo Courtesy of USA Today Sports Images)
By Dakota Antelman
Sunday night in Boston, Bruins defensemen Matt Bartkowski was assessed a total of 20 penalty minutes following a brutal open ice hit on Buffalo Sabers forward right wing Brian Gionta. At first glance, the almost universal consensus was that Bartkowski was in for some supplementary discipline but as Sunday turned to Monday, the NHL Department of Player Safety announced via Twitter that Bartkowski would not even be called in for a hearing.
In a series of Tweets published Monday morning, the Department of Player Safety said that the Bartkowski hit on Gionta was an “example of incidental contact on an otherwise full body check.”
The league put the onus on Gionta to avoid situations where contact to the head would be unavoidable. They decided that the fact that Bartkowski’s shoulder made contact with Gionta was the fault not of Bartkowski but rather Gionta. Furthermore, the Department of Player Safety’s also insisted that Gionta’s head was not the “PRINCIPLE” point of contact and therefore the hit did not classify as a head shot.
Very simply, the final answer the league reached on the question - should Bartkowski be suspended - was no.
Understandably Bartkowski was satisfied with that conclusion.
"I watched the replay and I didn't see any head contact," Bartkowski said. "It's not like I was trying to hit him in the head or anything. I was just riding the [blue] line and it was just a play in the game."
Needless to say though, even if the Bartkowski hit wasn’t technically illegal, the ferocity of it was of the sort that solicits cringes and explicatory remarks aimed at trying to absolve the league of any blame for allowing players to be knocked down in the way that Gionta was. Gionta was hit hard by a 196 pound man in Bartkowski. He was flipped 180o through the air and thrown in a way that ended up with him landing with the entirety of his own 176 pound frame upon his head and neck.
Gionta was injured, dazed, nearly knocked out by the hit. But in terms of the rulebook, the hit was 100% illegal. Thus the conclusion can be drawn that very obviously, the Department of Player Safety got the call right and the on ice officials got it wrong.
Bartowski was given a game misconduct, a fighting major and a major penalty for interference adding up to 20 total penalty minutes earned on one play. The officials saw grievance and malice in the hit and as a result emptied the bag on Bartowski.
However, in empting the bag they seemed to have gone too far. With little definitive evidence in favor of the hit being truly illegal, vilifying him with such a statistic as 20 penalty minutes is something Bartowski does not deserve.
The officials saw a brutal hit and immediately assumed that it was illegal. They saw Gionta lying on the ice, shaken up by the force of 372 pounds of human colliding at 10 miles per hour, cringed and assessed unearned penalties.
They did not account for the fact that a game that features big muscular men skating as fast as they can with the goal of ultimately slamming into each other, can see people get hurt in totally unassuming or in this case, at least legal ways.
The on ice officials calling of the hit cast an unfair precedence on the Bruins D-Man that seemed to create bias among many observers (myself included).
Ultimately, hockey is a rough game and when the roughness turns painful, we must not vilify the players involved. Rather, simply support the player collapsed on the ground. End of story. Matt Bartowski is playing Tuesday night.
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