In a shocking announcement, the WCHA actually announced that they had handed out supplemental discipline by suspending a player for one game next weekend. In even more shocking news, that player was neither Trevor Bruess nor that guy that made it onto famed ESPN talk show The Gentleman's Yellery and made us all look like jerks.
The WCHA announced a one-game suspension for Nebraska-Omaha's Dominic Zombo for a knee-to-knee hit on Minnesota-Duluth's JT Brown. Zombo was only assessed a two-minute penalty on the play. Many Duluth fans were perplexed why the hit didn't draw a five-minute major penalty. If only there were some short, lupine-themed fable to help explain it.
Zombo will miss UNO's next game, on Friday against Minnesota State, and given his 0 points through 23 games this year, he'll probably miss it more than the game will miss him.
The WCHA's suspension comes a week after the CCHA got serious about discipline, suspending Lake Superior's Andrew Perrault for one game, and Miami's Tyler Biggs for two games for contact to the head penalties.
0 recs | 1 comments
The Zombo/Brown incident is peripheral
to the real issue, which is head injuries. Hockey has always been about physical punishment, escalating from a little pushing and shoving at the mite level to bone crushing shots in the NHL. It’s a process that weeds out a lot of good skaters and puck handlers that don’t enjoy having their teeth rattled every time they step on the ice.
Be that as it may, the Jablonski and Privette incidents have attracted the attention of people outside the small world of hockey. Just as people who have never attended a bull fight or cockfight were instrumental in passing legislation banning those activities, so it will be with hockey. These ostensibly concerned busy-bodies shouldn’t get the blame for turning hockey into unsynchronized figure skating, however. That onus will rest on the players themselves. Unless coaches want to see a game that resembles bad basketball, they better get across to the players under their control that if techniques employed to injure other players aren’t discarded, the players that take advantage of them and play a physical game in general, won’t even make the team anymore. Maybe that’s a good thing. The gratuitous slam into the end boards has never made any sense anyway. At the same time, the open-ice hip check seems to have disappeared. It will be interesting to see how all this shakes out.
chuck martel - January 18, 2012
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