The “Sean Avery Rule”

Well, it took the NHL about 12 hours to respond to Rangers forward Sean Avery’s latest antics. There is “screening the goalie” and then there is this:

Official release from the NHL today:

– MEDIA ADVISORY –

INTERPRETATION OF RULE 75 – UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT

NEW YORK/TORONTO (April 14, 2008) –

National Hockey League Senior
Executive Vice President and Director of Hockey Operations Colin Campbell
today issued the following advisory on the interpretation of Rule 75 -
Unsportsmanlike Conduct: “An unsportsmanlike conduct minor penalty (Rule
75) will be interpreted and applied, effective immediately, to a situation
when an offensive player positions himself facing the opposition goaltender
and engages in actions such as waving his arms or stick in front of the
goaltender’s face, for the purpose of improperly interfering with and/or
distracting the goaltender as opposed to positioning himself to try to make
a play.”

This reaction has been typical:

Avery embarrassed himself, team with bad sportsmanship

By Al Strachan
Noted hockey writer Al Strachan is a regular contributor for FOXSports.com.

Updated: April 14, 2008, 11:59 AM EST

The directive will probably go out to the on-ice officials today.  The coaches and general managers will be informed, and they’ll pass the message along to the players.  Antics like those perpetrated by Sean Avery on Sunday night will no longer be tolerated.  Avery was playing for his New York Rangers against the New Jersey Devils when he decided to screen Devils goaltender Martin Brodeur. So far, so good.

But Avery didn’t do it in the accepted fashion of merely standing in front of Brodeur while he watched the play. Instead, he turned his back to the play, waved his stick back and forth in front of Brodeur’s face and delivered his usual trash talk.  Even Avery’s teammate, Chris Drury, took exception to the performance and came over to try to budge him. But as anyone familiar with Avery might expect, it did no good.

In the hockey community, the reaction was almost totally negative. Commentators on the two networks that were showing the game — Versus and TSN — were strongly opposed. CBC was showing the Boston-Montreal game, but between periods, the network’s analysts chimed in with their condemnation.

The trash talking is bad enough. Certainly it exists in hockey, but not to the level that it exists in other sports. After all, it’s one thing to yap at another basketball player or a football player. It’s almost part of the game.

Do it in hockey and you’ll probably get punched. That fact does a lot to discourage the practice.  And whereas hockey’s trash talking tends to relate to a player’s skills — or lack thereof — Avery’s trash talking gets highly personal. In this case, it usually relates to Brodeur’s 2003 divorce.  Brodeur himself shrugs it off. “I heard everything throughout the 2003 playoffs,” he told the Bergen Record last week.

“It’s funny, the lack of new material. I told him, It has been five years. Find something else.’”

But usually, Brodeur says nothing. “If it would be in French, I would be able to come up with a quick answer,” he said. “But in English, I’ve got to think about it, and then by the time I put it into English, he’s gone.”

But on Sunday, Avery didn’t go. And so you can figure what’s going to happen next. Even though the playoffs have been exciting and have featured some magnificent plays, it is Avery’s performance that is going to get the attention on the highlight shows.  Hockey needs a positive presentation these days. It has to shed the circus image that people like Avery give it.  Even though no penalty was called on Avery on Sunday, the league does have a weapon at its disposal. The rule book gives referees the discretion to assess a 10-minute misconduct for “incitement.”

In the universally accepted code of hockey conduct, any hassling of a goaltender merits a quick response. So there is nothing more likely to “incite” a team than to stand on the edge of a crease waving a stick across the goalie’s line of vision.  Therefore, the practice has to be stopped. But there won’t be a rule change, just a rule interpretation.  This is not Avery’s first achievement in this regard. He’s at least partly responsible for the fact that in these playoffs, for the first time, the stand-by referee has the duty of sitting in the penalty box to watch the pregame warmup.

In the past, the referees have occasionally watched the warmup from a location of their choice — a hallway, a vacant seat or the Zamboni entrance. But when the fun began, their view was often blocked — if indeed they were there. Not every stand-by referee got to the building in time for the warmup.

But now, the ref must be in the penalty box so that if a problem erupts, he’ll have an unobstructed view and will be close enough to warn off the potential combatants.  The pregame tussle that Avery incited with Jason Blake and Darcy Tucker of the Toronto Maple Leafs earlier this season had a lot to do with the issuing of this directive.

And when you get right down to it, despite embarrassing his team and his sport, what good did Avery do on Sunday night?

The Rangers lost 4-3 in overtime, their first loss of the series.