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Sheriff Shanahan building a reputation

Columns

Written by Frank Seravalli

Tuesday, September 27, 2011 19:45

Brendan Shanahan is a week into his new job as the NHL's dean of discipline and already he's made a major impact on the game.

Brendan Shanahan has been on the job as the NHL's new dean of discipline for a little more than a week, yet he might as well be nicknamed Shana-ban or Shana-hammer.

He has had more impact on the NHL in eight days on the job than most have in their entire careers.

After lording over a little more than 70 preseason games, Shanahan has already doled out six different suspensions totaling 23 preseason games and 22 regular-season contests. He has levied close to $1 million in fines throughout the course of a usually quiet exhibition season.

More suspensions will arrive in the coming days. For the NHL's new director of player safety, doling out discipline in hockey is like being a trash collector or undertaker – there is never a shortage of work.

Shanahan has been so backed up and has spent so much time in the NHL's New York City studio filming explanations that he hasn't been able to handle his docket efficiently enough to keep up with the hits that pile up nightly.

With a few days off for teams between games, some hearings have been postponed to allow for more pressing situations to be rectified quickly.

To say that Shanahan has set the tone for a new reign of NHL discipline would be an understatement.

Clearly, the league – its players and general managers – are unified in wanting to curb dangerous head shots in an attempt to cut down on the number of concussions.

Yes, hitting players where it hurts, in both the wallet and on the lineup card, is a good way to call attention to their on-ice detail.

Yes, Shanahan was required to set a precedent and establish trends for how he will handle questionable scenarios.

He isn't paid to waffle in the middle and it's not the type of job where you can get your feet wet by watching, even though the league purposely allows for gray areas with regards to rule interpretation.

Yes, with the use of technology, he has brought long-overdue transparency and clarity to a thankless role with his video presentations available to fans and media on NHL.com. Hopefully, we will still see video explanations on borderline but legal hits that were not punished, with reasons why.

With the use of technology, Shanahan has brought long-overdue transparency and clarity to a thankless role.

But just because Shanahan has handed out suspensions in the preseason like they are invitations to Hugh Hefner's mansion, and done it by quoting the rulebook in front of a camera, doesn't exactly mean that he has done a better job than his predecessor, Colin Campbell.

Change in the game is the only true judgment and the jury hasn't been out nearly long enough.

It was easy for Shanahan to throw the book at Calgary's Pierre-Luc Letourneau-Leblond (one regular-season game and four preseason contests) and Philadelphia's Jody Shelley, two guys who are repeat offenders of the NHL's rulebook.

It would have sent more of a message to make those offending players, who don't start getting paid until Oct. 6 anyway, to play in those dreadful, meaningless preseason games rather than give them an unpaid vacation.

We learned an awful lot about Sheriff Shanahan when he decided to ban Columbus defenseman James Wisniewski for four preseason games and a whopping eight games to start the regular season. Sure, Wisniewski is a repeat offender, but he is also a star player. He wasn't signed to a six-year, $33 million deal this summer to be a goon – or a dummy.

He will instead sacrifice $536,585 in salary – to a players' Emergency Assistance Fund that is overflowing with cash – and more importantly miss almost 10 percent of his team's season. That's a stiff penalty for a playoff fringe team that can't afford to fumble games at any point during the season.

It seems like too stiff of a penalty, not only in a game where players are taught to police themselves at an early age, but also without taking into consideration that Cal Clutterbuck may have embellished the contact, as Wisniewski immediately contended.

Consider it a message sent to all 30 dressing rooms league-wide. Loud and clear.

Shanahan's decisions will always be questioned. That's the nature of his job. There will be disagreements, outcries, and more dollars donated and empty locker stalls on game nights.

Shanahan has already started heading down a path that is all his own. If this is his message, it needs to be consistent. It can't waver like it did on Wednesday, when he suspended the Flyers' Tom Sestito for two preseason games and two regular-season games for a boarding call that was very similar to the one that got teammate Jody Shelley a 10-game ban a few days earlier. Is a previous disciplinary record worth three more regular-season games? Tough to say.

He has the unique distinction of having been suspended by three different NHL deans of discipline, including Campbell, Brian Burke and Brian O'Neill. The only question is whether these stiff punishments will change the game enough to curb a problem that his predecessors could not.