After last night's 2-1 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs in New York, Rangers alternate captain Brendan Shanahan had had enough with the way the refs were ignoring the abuse that Jaromir Jagr had taken over the course of the evening:
"I don't know what the deal is,'' an angry Shanahan said. "Guys hit him late, guys hit him high, guys hook his hands. He doesn't complain. He just goes out and plays and plays and plays. The referees just seem to have a different set of rules about the way people get to play against him."Not since (Slava) Fetisov came over from Russia have I ever seen a star player get ignored by the referees, and I know the reason why they were ignoring him back then.''
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"I just have a tough time sitting there throughout the game, especially in the second period, watching the calls against one of the best players in the league. The NBA didn't let people grab (Michael) Jordan by the waist every time he went up for a jump shot. Jags has to play through that all season long.
"It's not just tonight's refs, it's every night. I have played with other superstar players and they get a whole lot more respect than this guy, and I am trying to eliminate the reasons why that's the way it is.''
I watched last night's game on NHL Center Ice, though admittedly with one eye on the screen and the other on my laptop. But what I do remember, outside of Mats Sundin's breakaway goal that put the game away early in the thrid period, was seeing Colton Orr of the Rangers jawing with some Toronto player. And looking back, all I can think is was Orr seeing the same thing that Shanahan saw, but unable to do anything about it in a close game where a two-minute instigator call might have given the Leafs an invaluable extra power play?
It's not an idle thought, and it's one that's been on my mind for a couple of days since I finally picked up Ross Bernstein's new book, The Code: The Unwritten Rules of Fighting and Retaliation in the New NHL. I'm only a few chapters into the book, so it's a little early to pass judgement on it. Then again, the purchase price alone might have been worth it for the simple inclusion of a 2005 article by ex-NHL defenseman and current player agent Neil Sheehy, The Systematic Erosion and Neutralization of Skill and Play-making in the NHL.
Sheehy's thesis is simple: Because of the implementation of the instigator rule, low-skilled agitators like himself were free to take all sorts of liberties with high-skilled players and knock them off their game. In Sheehy's case, he reached the apex of his effectiveness in the mid-1980s when he played for Calgary and shadowed Wayne Gretzky in several editions of The Battle of Alberta:
I played an important role within Badger Bob
