I’m not the only Capitals fan who could watch this all day, right?

Mike Brophy is becoming my favorite hockey writer. Because he’s so damn easy to mock.

Apparently not satisfied with embarrassing himself to the hockey community with this gem about why the Capitals should looked to trade Ovechkin (my commentary here), Brophy has penned a new piece about why the NHL should retain the instigator penalty.

I’m not nuts about removing the instigator rule; I think good arguments can be made both for keeping it and eliminating it. I’m not going to attack Brophy for his opinion, but rather for his reasoning and writing. After much consideration (must have been at least four seconds) I decided to use the tried-and-true method favored by the pros at FireJoeMorgan.com. Thus I give you the glory of Mike Brophy.

You hear it nearly every week – get rid of the instigator rule.

…

While we’re at it, let’s arm motorists, so if somebody follows too closely or cuts you off, you can pull out your piece and shoot out their tires. Let’s give grocery store cashiers baseball bats so if somebody gets in the 10-or-fewer items line with 12, they can be kneecapped.

Best. Analogy. Ever.

I’m kind of tempted to just let that sit and speak for itself, but I feel that I have to dig beyond the superficial, surface level of idiocy that jumps out of this article. Because it’s just more fun that way.

The surface-level idiocy I referred to is the general absurdity of the analogy. But the ineffective use of analogy goes beyond that because it compares different things. And I just can’t let butchering of the English language stand.

The issue of the instigator rule is an issue of severity of punishment. What Brophy talks about in his analogy [motorists; grocery store clerks] is providing people with the means to commit a violent act more effectively. The instigator penalty does not deal with means to commit an illegal act. It deals with punishment. These are two very different things. Acceptable analogies using the same basic framework would include:

(1) “Removing the instigator penalty would be like reducing the jail time for shooting out someone’s tires because they cut you off from [current sentence] to [new, lesser sentence] - it’s just not enough of a deterrent.”

(2) “Arming motorists so they can shoot out the tires of people who have cut them off would be like giving grocery store cashiers baseball bats so if somebody gets in the 10-or-fewer items line with 12, they can be kneecapped or allowing NHL enforcer to carry sharpened sticks to injure players that have offended their team in some manner.”

I’ll assume Brophy didn’t go with option number one because it doesn’t have shock value and isn’t “clever” and didn’t go with option two because it makes no sense, since the issue of what equipment players can carry is not affected by the instigator rule. Why he chose to combine the two into a statement that makes even less sense is beyond me.

Oh, and let’s allow Chris Simon to drop his gloves and beat Ryan Hollweg to a pulp because Hollweg, who is not a fighter, has the audacity to hit him. Let’s let Chris Simon slug the snot out of Jarkko Ruutu because, like Hollweg, he banged the Islanders’ aging tough guy.

Keep in mind that this passage is already stupid because it references the aforementioned stupid and meaningless analogy. But then also consider this: “let’s allow Chris Simon to drop his gloves and beat Ryan Hollweg to a pulp because Hollweg, who is not a fighter, has the audacity to hit him“.

Now watch this.

It’s currently 6:56:01 PM, December 19. Ryan Hollweg fought 13 times in the 2006-07 season. It is now 6:56:45, December 19. It took me 44 seconds to research and write that.

I’m not a professional journalist in any sense. Especially not for one of the biggest hockey publications on the planet. I am a graduate student in Atlanta killing time and watching the replay of the Senators/Bruins game from last night. Yet I was willing and able to research this post before I posted it. Can’t Brophy do the same? And if he can’t (or isn’t willing to), and as a result makes such an obvious oversight, why should anyone take his opinion seriously?

Here’s a novel idea for NHL players – if you don’t like the way Ryan Hollweg or Jarkko Ruutu hit your teammates, hit them back. Drive them hard into the boards. Crunch them with an open-ice hit. Get even or, heaven forbid, drop your gloves and fight them whether they want to fight back or not. Take that whopping risk of receiving an extra minor penalty for being the instigator.

So then, just to recap:

Oh, and let’s allow Chris Simon to drop his gloves and beat Ryan Hollweg to a pulp because Hollweg, who is not a fighter, has the audacity to hit him. Let’s let Chris Simon slug the snot out of Jarkko Ruutu because, like Hollweg, he banged the Islanders’ aging tough guy. Give me a break.

then…

Here’s a novel idea for NHL players – if you don’t like the way Ryan Hollweg or Jarkko Ruutu hit your teammates, hit them back…drop your gloves and fight them whether they want to fight back or not. Take that whopping risk of receiving an extra minor penalty for being the instigator.

So…this article’s first point is that the idea that players should police themselves and fight is ridiculous (”give me a break”). This article’s second point is that the much better solution is to…fight with opposing agitators whether they want to or not.

Oh. Well, at least that’s clear.

Also, the phrase whopping risk of receiving an extra minor penalty for being the instigator is incorrect as well. Being the instigator results in a two minute minor, a five minute fighting major and a ten minute misconduct. Again, where’s the research, Brophy? For that matter, where are the editors?

The NHL will never, ever get rid of the instigator penalty. It would be so politically incorrect it defies consideration. The league says repeatedly it is comfortable with where fighting is now, largely because stiff penalties have eliminated nasty brawls. Fact is, we see more brawls in baseball than we do in hockey these days.

You think Gary Bettman is going to stand before a microphone and tell the world the league has decided, for the good of the game, the NHL will let goons run the show? Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

If the NHL can give a guy on his eighth suspension 30 games for a play that could have easily ended another player’s career and adversely affected his quality of life outside of hockey for the rest of his life less than a year after he used his stick like a baseball bat against a guy’s face (an infraction which resulted in only 25 games) and give a guy who attacked another play from behind, cracking several vertebrae and not only ending his NHL career but taking away the chance to ever play hockey again 20 games, I think they can justify removing the instigator penalty.

Contrary to the opinion of some, removal of the instigator penalty would not turn NHL games into brawls on a regular basis. Why? The aggressor penalty that’s still on the books in the NHL, which reads:

“The aggressor in an altercation shall be the player who continues to throw punches in an attempt to inflict punishment on his opponent who is in a defenseless position or who is an unwilling combatant. A player must be deemed the aggressor when he continues throwing and landing punches in a further attempt to inflict punishment and/or injury on his opponent who is no longer in a position to defend himself.”

With this rule on the books players are still protected from completely unprovoked attacks or from being attacked after they’ve gone into a defenseless position, but the
player who has challenged an opposing player to a fight won’t get an extra penalty for dropping their gloves first.

There’s a decent case to be made for the instigator penalty, folks. But this ain’t it.

Be sure to check back next week when Brophy advocates the return of the glowing puck!

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the sports landscape in the United States can tell you that hockey has a tenuous hold on the title “major sport”. In reality the NHL is not on the same level in terms of revenues, relevance or attention as the NFL, NBA or Major League Baseball and understandably the league has been working to change this. The three issues the league has primarily focused on when trying to increase its fan base have been: parity, scoring and fighting.

The league has worked to increase parity under the belief that fans will better support a team that has a better chance of winning every night, increase scoring because of a belief that games with more goals are more exciting to fans (and as a reaction to the incredibly low scoring games that were all too common in the early 2000’s) and decrease fighting under the belief that the NHL’s reputation as a league of violence was turning away casual fans.

So what actually determines interest (and hence attendance) in hockey? This was the question Rodney J. Paul attempted to answer in this paper, published in April 2003 in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology.

Winning and Parity

Not surprisingly Dr. Paul found that teams that tend to perform better on the ice in terms of standings points tend to draw bigger crowds, all else being equal. Specifically an average of one more point per game raises the attendance by 1021.809 fans per game, and by 1426.866 fans per game in the United States. Now, obviously one more point per game is an enormous difference in success. The best teams in the NHL in the 2006-07 season (Buffalo and Detroit) averaged 1.37 points per game while the worst averaged (Philadelphia) averaged 0.68, so the effect is not as large as might be expected. However, previous season’s points (one additional point from the previous season means 120 more fans per game for U.S. teams, all else being equal) and playoff success (reaching the second round of the playoffs or further) were also statistically significant. Given this it seems pretty clear than more successful teams draw bigger crowds. Not shocking, I know. But since team success has significant impact on attendance and the NHL wants all of its franchises to be financially healthy it makes economic sense to increase parity, and especially to do so by the means of a salary cap.

Scoring

The league has been adamant in its insistence that fans want to see more scoring. This insistence has been the impetus behind a number of changes in recent years: not allowing goalies to play the puck in the corners, calling hooking and holding penalties when there is even intent to hook or hold, decreasing the size of goalie equipment, making a team that has iced the puck keep its players on the ice for the next faceoff and calling delay of game any time a player puts the puck out of play while in their own end. Given how loudly NHL head office officials insist fans want to see scoring Dr. Paul’s finding are surprising: if all else is equal, the number of goals per game a team scores actually lowers average attendance (this coefficient was also statistically significant). On the other hand, visitors with higher per-game averages in terms of goals scored did draw bigger crowds. I would attribute this to fans desire to see marquee players, who are general offensive talents, a variable Dr. Paul did not control for. At best, the jury is out on this one, which makes you wonder why the league is so concerned with upping scoring.

Fighting

Do the fans really like fighting? That’s a question that been posed in a number of different forms for years now and the overwhelming statistical evidence says ‘yes’.

According to Dr. Paul’s paper an increase of one fight per game will raise per-game attendance by 3859.880 fans; 4686.510 fans for U.S. teams, all else being equal. As with points per game a difference of one fight per game would be huge - the Anaheim (Fightin’) Ducks led the NHL with 0.87 fights per game last year and the Detroit Red Wings had the fewest with 0.12 per game. So while in increase in fights of one per game is unlikely it’s feasible that a team could see a 20% increase in their fighting majors which would result in 937 more fans per game (in the U.S.) (note: Detroit is playing to 88.8% capacity this season; Anaheim is playing to 107% capacity).

I’m not a hockey fight advocate nut and don’t want to see bench clearers, the league averaging six fights a game or line brawls on a regular basis. It already irks me when people have the notion that hockey is just constant fighting and just whine about wanting to see a fight when they’re at a game and I want the league to be viewed as the toughest sport in the world, not a spectacle. But I, like most hockey fans I think, do like fighting and think it has a place in the professional game. Like the league’s obsession with increasing scoring it is curious, to say the least, that there has been such a crackdown on fighting when the numbers seem to clearly indicate that it draws more fans.

My theory is that one of two things is going on. One possibility is that the NHL has different data or is getting different results from what is presented in Dr. Paul’s paper. However, I would be pretty surprised if that were the case as it’s unlikely people’s preferences would have changed so drastically in only a few years. What I think is more likely is that the NHL is chasing people who are either casual fans or are not fans of the NHL and in doing so they’re following an opinion that is parroted by so many talking heads with little or no knowledge of the NHL or the game of hockey. It seems like the league is chasing these people and trying to make them into fans which really just isn’t going to happen. This is in large part, I believe, due to the fact the Gary Bettman does not come from a hockey background and thus is predisposed to give these voices more pull than they should have. Sadly I do not have any analytical data for this but my experience has been that when people start talking about what a travesty it is that the NHL has lesser penalties for fighting than other sports, they’re people who wouldn’t watch the NHL anyway (seriously, the next time it happens, ask).

The reality is that fighting, along with exciting games with plenty of scoring chances, draws crowds as long as the fighting doesn’t get out of control. That’s why hockey was booming in the early to mid 90s - the 80s (and early 90s, to me, but maybe that’s because I can’t remember much before then) were great hockey and so people started to sit up and take notice. Now the league is chasing whatever additional attention and revenue it can get in the next six months without thinking about what it can do to make itself the best professional sports league in the world in the long run.

That’s really what it comes down to. The league needs to stop its obsession with month-to-month attendance and dreaming up new gimmicks to try and put a few more people in the seats for a short period of time and instead focus on making the league the most exciting league in the world and marketing it as so. If they’re able to do that concerns over the NHLs popularity and viability should cease.