Coyotes Chat: Paul Bissonnette has some words about Connor McDavid

Paul Bissonnette would like to talk to you about fighting in the NHL

I had really almost forgotten that Paul Bissonnette was the biggest mouth on the Arizona Phoenix Coyotes.

Puck Prose

It seems like everyone has something to say about fighting in the NHL, and they are one hundred percent correct and everyone else is an idiot.

Mike Milbury has decided that he’s adamantly against it, and it needs to be eliminated from the league ASAP. Sidney Crosby thinks that you gotta do you what you gotta do, and doesn’t really have much to say on the matter beyond that because he’s Sidney Crosby and doesn’t like to ruffle feathers. The Hockey News is putting out an entire issue on fighting; Dave Lozo of Bleacher Report is offending everybody with his comparison of fighting in hockey to media reporters hitting each other with laptops.

Seriously, though — I’ve never seen a larger amassing of people calling each other ‘idiot’ than in the comment section on pretty much every opinion article on fighting this past week.

The league has been deeply entrenched in this controversy for pretty much this entire season, bleeding back into the summer. Things really came to a head, though, when this happened:

Long story short, WonderBoy prospect Connor McDavid broke his right hand in a fight this week, and he’s out for the next five to six weeks while it heals.

Shouldn’t have much of an impact on his standings in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft (in which he’s projected to go first overall), but people are still losing their minds over it.

Consequently, Paul Bissonnette had some… things to say.

Oh. Well then.

We’ll be talking about our takes on the fighting situation a bit more during the Howlin’ Hockey podcast, but this brings up another interesting point:

Are we qualified to have a say in what should be done about fighting in the league in the first place? 

For starters, I think everyone’s entitled to an opinion.

Puck Prose

I, personally, can’t picture an NHL game in which dropping the gloves is completely banned. I think there should be some guidelines, obviously — for example, bashing your opponent’s head into the ice is not exactly okay on any level — but there’s an element of risk in almost every aspect of a high-contact sport, and I don’t think that doing away with fighting completely is the answer. 

Beyond my right to an opinion, though, Biznasty does bring up an interesting point- as someone who’s never played in the NHL, I can only base my opinions on what I’ve seen, heard about, researched, and concluded based on secondhand knowledge.

I have a whole slew of problems with Bissonnette’s delivery, of course. His presumption that sports media is comprised of people who have ‘never played a competitive sport in their lives’ is as belittling and caustic as the backlash that suggests that Bissonnette only wants to see fighting in the league because it’s all he’s good for.

I would like to think that I’ve played competitive sports enough over the course of my life — and played enough hockey — to have a pretty decent idea of what a competitive sport is like. Do I have a professional athlete’s perspective? Of course not. Do I still know how much it hurts to get a slapshot to the ribcage when you weren’t expecting it (and maybe decided to play in partial gear)? Yeah, I do. Have I been run by one of my own defenseman before and got knocked a little silly? Actually, yeah — so I know that head injuries can come from any part of the game, and it’s affected my stance on the need to get rid of fighting altogether. 

I think the biggest problem with this athlete backlash to writer commentary is that, when you really take a moment to think about it, Paul Bissonnette has as much right to comment on the long-term effects of fighting as I do. If anything, the only person who is truly allowed to comment on fighting in the NHL, according to Bissonnette’s implied standards, is Mike Milbury — and Chris Pronger, and Marc Savard, and anyone else in the league who has either experienced the lasting repercussions of fighting or caused lasting repercussions through a fight. Paul Bissonnette isn’t fifteen years retired with a bad knee — he’s a player who’s still strong, healthy, and able to play the game with his stick and his fists.

If we really want to limit opinions to those who have ‘seen it all’, so be it — but I hope these NHL guys don’t get upset when they realize that they’ve taken their own opinions out of consideration, too.

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