Thats not true at all. The amount of suspensions these players got should tell you how wrong you are. The whole thing with players like Cooke, Torres, Brian Marchment, Claude Lemieux etc was that they played so blatantly outside of the rules of their time.
Yeah, its a rare-scenario especially in the modern game. At the start of the breakout, the Devils have 5 guys behind the puck. With no 2 line pass rule, Detroit probably tries to slow down its breakout and has a defender carry it up and dump it in as Detroit gets its numbers up (outside of Kozlov being marked by the Right-sided D). Devil's essentially had all the forwards breaking in marked by the other forwards, allowing Stevens to break from his man to destroy Kozlov in open ice. Without the Devil's having picked up Doug Brown (with all the Red Wings being behind the blue-line), Stevens would have been quickly out of position allowing a straight drive to the net for Brown for Kozlov to quickly pass it to. It's pretty rare to see that many players back in the neutral zone at the start of a breakout now, essentially giving the defenceman who isn't on the side of the player with the puck complete freedom to roam.
Hmm they made half those hits illegal because of those guys and changed the rules halfway through their careers like they should have done with Stevens. Like watch Torres almost kill a guy every series of the 06 playoffs it was all legal
All of Matt Cooke's suspensions besides a spearing incident against Matt Johnson were after blindside headshots were penalized.
Hmm but would he have been as good ? Idk he was a pretty skilled player but him destroying guys was a big part of his game
I just went by what hockey db had them listed as. Same height and only a 5 lb weight difference
That’s a comically inaccurate statement. Hits where the hitters feet did not leave the ground and elbows were at the hitters sides were perfectly legal and were not perceived as dirty. Players who could do this were celebrated. It wasn’t until 2010 with rule 48, then later 48.1 where hits to the head were banned and the onus was put on the hitters for what the end results were, did the idea what Stevens did was dirty come to be.
You were the only one that brought “flying headshots” into the discussion. My post that you quoted talked about legal hits not being considered dirty. By quoting my post, you seem to indicate I thought flying elbows were legal. How else am I supposed to interpret it?
Except that he didn't. Lindros was his own biggest enemy by never learning to skate with his head up while having the puck. It never stuck in his brain that what he could get away with in juniors wouldn't work in the NHL. Kariya wasn't effected by the Stevens hit either. He ended up suffering multiple other injuries after that hit that effected his career. The hit that sidetracked his career was the cross-check to the head from Suter in 98.
The articles talk about changing the rules in the future because it’s shortening careers. Nobody is complaining about Stevens. They point out that what he did wasn’t against the rules. That’s my point. People keep calling Stevens “Dirty” and I have to keep defending him as he was NOT by the league standards and rules of the day.I responded to this:
"If you want to talk “ethics” rather than the “rules”, the only ethic at the time was that if you knocked somebody into next week, you may be challenged to a fight. If you obliged, nobody complained. "
That is not correct. There was absolutely a debate during that time period over where the lines were drawn.
Look at the hit that took Lafontaine out of the 1990 playoffs. Perfectly legal by the rulebook -- and that includes the jump, which was not illegal at the time -- but it was a problematic incident. Stevens' hit on Lindros was similar, within the rules but it created a massive debate about what constituted a dirty hit, and what kind of hit belongs in the game. Acting like this was not controversial, or that it was solved with a quick fight (in the era of designated fighters, no less) is grossly oversimplifying a complicated era.
This article was written in the immediate wake of the Stevens/Lindros hit. You can clearly see how Stevens himself, let alone others, struggled to deal with it.
This article appeared in a huge, front-page spread in the National Post the following day.
This article has Rick Tocchet -- the all-time PIM leader for the Flyers franchise, a guy who knows a thing or two about the ethics of hitting and fighting -- openly calling for a revision of the rules to eliminate a repeat of that incident. Openly pointing to Colin Campbell as the man who needed to make it happen.
As noted upthread, in 1997 Campbell stated in plain English that his main goal was to crack down on headshots. In 2000, with nothing yet changed, Tocchet called him out on the floor for a lack of action. Emails released during the concussion lawsuit show Campbell stonewalling rule changes as late as 2010, when his private reaction to the Savard hit was "someone should teach that young man about keeping his head up!". Rule 48 passed later that summer, over his objections.
That's the real story of the 90s and 00s. Many people inside and outside of the league had been pressing for Stevens-style headhunting to be addressed for over a decade. It was a known issue, probably the most divisive issue in the sport other than fighting. The lack of action was not reflective of a lack of debate, but the result of a subset of key individuals (including Campbell and Brian Burke on the inside, Don Cherry on the outside) using their platforms to preserve the game in a state that was bloodier and therefore more marketable. To the extent that a generation of players bought into that ethic, they paid a severe price for being such good soldiers.
