Earlier this season, I talked about the problem that the NHL has when it comes to keeping players healthy. You can go back and re-read that article if you wish, but to summarize my point in a few sentences, it’s not a good thing for the product on the ice or the NHL in general when players can’t get on the ice. Some injuries are unavoidable. Most injuries aren’t a direct result of malicious play. But one way the league could do a better job of keeping players healthy would be if the NHL’s Department of Player Safety (DoPS) actually took their job seriously and lengthy suspensions were an actually deterrent for dirty play.
The DoPS, under the leadership of George Parros, has consistently come up short in that respect.
We were reminded of that last week when Toronto Maple Leafs captain Auston Matthews suffered a season-ending injury. As he was receiving a pass from William Nylander, an out-of-position Radko Gudas raced to cover a wide open Matthews in front of the net. Gudas deliberately stuck his knee out, which you’re not allowed to do, and made knee-on-knee contact with Matthews, knocking him out of the game. The Maple Leafs wound up announcing on Friday that Matthews would miss the remainder of the season with an MCL tear and quad contusion in his right leg.
It isn’t right or fair necessarily that an injury that Matthews sustained as a result of a dirty play draws more attention than, say, an injury Jonas Siegenthaler might suffer as a result of a dirty play, but it is what it is. Matthews is the captain of the Maple Leafs. He’s the captain of the US Men’s Hockey team that just won a gold medal at the Olympics. He’s one of the biggest star players in the league. He plays in the biggest media market in Toronto where everything is magnified, dissected, and overly scrutinized. It doesn’t matter that Matthews individually is having a down year or that the Maple Leafs aren’t going to the playoffs. When a player of that magnitude gets knocked out of the game and knocked out for the remainder of the season as a direct result of a dirty hit, people are going to take notice.
The DoPS offered Gudas a phone hearing, which automatically sounded alarm bells that they would be going soft on Gudas, a player with a lengthy track record of dirty hits and suspensions. An in-person hearing would’ve given the league the option of giving Gudas more than five games, which would’ve been justified given the history of the player involved. It also would’ve opened the door to the suspension potentially being reduced upon appeal. Instead, the phone hearing confirmed that any discipline would be five games max, which is what it ultimately was.
Judd Moldaver, who represents Matthews, called the five game suspension that Gudas received “laughable”. Connor McDavid took it a step further and called for change to how the process is handled at the DoPS. In an unrelated incident, Kiefer Sherwood took issue with the league earlier this week for a headshot by Charlie McAvoy and called on the DoPS to better address head shots. As of this writing, the DoPS has not disciplined McAvoy, who had an assist in Boston’s OT loss to the Devils on Monday, so don’t expect anything to come from that.
Parros defended his department’s work when he spoke to reporters at the NHL general manager meetings on Tuesday.
“We sweat over these decisions and pore over these decisions every night, all season long,” Parros said. “We have a process in place that’s consistent, and we have a team that works for me, and together with me, that evaluates all these plays. A very experienced team, a veteran team, guys that have been there since the beginning of the department. Not to mention all the former players that have a large set of experiences playing NHL games, accolades. Some of the best guys that have played the game work for this department help make decisions. So, our process, I feel very confident in. We’ve got great guys who make these decisions, and I think the players should be confident in these teams to do so.”
Parros is correct in that their process is consistent. Where he is wrong is that their process is consistently bad and they consistently go easy when it comes to disciplining players. There are plenty of questionable plays that should result in a suspension, but the best fans can hope for when someone on their team is on the receiving end of a questionable play is a cookie cutter tweet from the NHL Player Safety account that said player has been fined $5,000, the maximum allowable under the CBA, for whatever the infraction is. The DoPS rarely, if ever, comes down hard on perpetrators.
Parros, a former enforcer who amassed 1,092 penalty minutes over his 474 game NHL career, has consistently shown that he will be soft on players who cross the line. What this ultimately means is that there’s no deterrent for when the Radko Gudases of the world do what they do. You can indeed go out of your way to knee somebody when you know the league is gonna give you a brief vacation before the playoffs, if not just slap you on the wrist altogether. You can go out of your way to knee somebody when the 2025-26 Maple Leafs are so soft, there won’t be any pushback.
You can be dirty when you know nobody is going to do anything about it. At least, you can under Gary Bettman and George Parros’ watch.
None of this is a knock on Gudas, by the way. I’ve advocated for the Devils to sign and trade for him at various points over the years on these forums. I’ve wanted them to get a “Gudas-type” because I know how soft this Devils team has been over the years. I like him as a player, even if he is declining as a defensive defenseman. But you also have to know that when you’re getting into the Radko Gudas business, this sort of thing comes with the territory. It’s not any different that if you get into the Jacob Trouba business, you know he’s going to throw a flying elbow at some point. Gudas is going to hit people. He’s going to be physical. And sometimes, he will cross that line. Still, I’d rather have those types of players on my team and begrudgingly root for them than play against them and hate their guts when they take a run at one of my guys.
Players like Gudas are a byproduct of a league, as well as a DoPS, that has consistently shown they do not actually care about the safety of their players, because if they did care about the safety of the players, they would take the job seriously and throw the book at players like Gudas. The league is so afraid of the optics of looking bad if a player suspension is reduced by appeal that they’d rather settle for “the maximum allowable under the CBA” rather than put their foot down and establish a zero-tolerance policy. The last thing the league wants is to have to explain themselves in front of an arbitrator.
Letting a former enforcer in Parros, who is the epitome of “boys will be boys” and letting the players police themselves, determine discipline is laughable. The NHLPA isn’t helping matters either, as they’re caught in the awkward position of representing everyone. So when the league throws the book at a player like Gudas, they have to defend them because you don’t want to set precedent. The problem with that is that it screws over other NHLPA members like Matthews who now have to spend most of their summer rehabbing a knee injury thanks to a dirty hit. It screws over the hundreds of players in the league who are also represented by the NHLPA who do things the right way.
Instead of defending, excusing and enabling the worst of the worst, the league and the DoPS should be looking to do whatever they can to ensure more players like Matthews are on the ice. They should be looking to make examples of players like Gudas of what not to do. They should be establishing a precedent that this isn’t acceptable.
What we get instead is a league that is ultimately ok with the quality of their product taking a significant hit when their best players can’t play thanks to plays like these.
Who do you think generates more revenue for the league, Auston Matthews or Radko Gudas? Connor McDavid or Matt Rempe? Jack “people pay to watch me play” Hughes or Viktor Arvidsson? Who do you think people are tuning in to watch play hockey? Who do you think people are paying their hard-earned money to go see when the best players in the world come to town the one time of the year they visit? Who do you think people are paying to get jerseys and other merchandise of? People want to watch players like Connor Bedard or Macklin Celebrini or Nathan MacKinnon do what they do best. Nobody wants to watch guys like Nick Cousins do what they do best.
Toronto isn’t heading to the playoffs this season, but let’s say they were within a game or two of being in a playoff berth. Let’s say the Matthews injury ultimately costs them their season and keeps them from playing in a playoff series. I get its Toronto and everyone loves to dunk on them for coming up small in the postseason, but don’t you think Rogers Communications and MLSE would rather have a playoff round’s worth of postseason revenues than not have it? I understand that people aren’t going to be sympathetic to billionaires and large media companies like Rogers losing money, but how many millions of dollars does that equate to in lost revenues?
I mentioned this in the article I linked at the top, but let’s take a look at a far more successful and profitable league in the NFL for a second.
The NFL introduced rules to protect quarterbacks years ago. The NFL is smart. They know that there aren’t enough good quarterbacks to go around and fill all 32 teams in their league. They know that if a star quarterback goes down because of a questionable play like a horse-collar tackle, a late hit, or a blow to the head, its not good for business. It’s not good for the quality of play. People pay to watch Patrick Mahomes play football. With all due respect to a career backup like Josh Johnson, nobody is paying to watch him play football.
Longtime, diehard fans might grumble and complain that this is yet another example of the “wussification of America” and “not the game that I grew up with”, but it hasn’t impacted the league’s bottom line. If anything, the NFL is more popular and profitable than ever, and a large part of the reason why is because its fun to watch elite level athletes like Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, or Josh Allen do things that only a small handful of people in the world can do. That doesn’t mean players don’t get injured in the NFL. Players get hurt there all the time. But at least they’re trying to make an effort to keep key players healthy. Because at the end of the day, if you don’t have elite level players, you don’t have anything.
The NHL should take a page out of the NFL’s book and take player safety more seriously. Obviously, that would start with the removal of Parros from his position and overhauling the DoPS. But it would also entail the NHL and NHLPA working together on establishing clear parameters of what is and is not acceptable so there’s less gray area. I get that the NHLPA may be weary of handing out more power to Gary Bettman and whoever is running the DoPS, but its really in the best interests of all parties involved to find common ground and a solution to this problem. Otherwise, you’ll have more star players like McDavid speaking out, which ultimately isn’t a good look for the league.
Then again, maybe we need more star players like McDavid to speak their mind. If that is what’s it’s going to take to shame the league into making long overdue changes, so be it.