Are NHL blood feuds a thing of the past? How the league’s evolution has tamed its playoffs

ST. PAUL, Minn. — When Nick Foligno was traded from the Chicago Blackhawks to the Minnesota Wild in March, one of the first texts he acquired got here from Dallas Stars ahead Matt Duchene, one of Foligno’s closest pals in hockey.

I hate that I’ve to hate you for the subsequent few months.

Of course, Duchene adopted that textual content up with one other one about how cool it was that Foligno would get to play together with his brother, Marcus, and the way genuinely comfortable he was for him. There wasn’t an express invite to the cottage this summer season, however, hey, that is at all times implied.

No, in the NHL, hatred is not what it was once.

The first-round collection between the Wild and the Stars has been fierce and bodily, as two of the most gifted groups in the league have not been shy about exhibiting their ugly sides. In Game 1, Dallas’ Tyler Myers gave Mats Zuccarello an obvious concussion with an elbow to the head, forcing him to overlook Games 2 and three and leaving him questionable for Game 4 on Saturday. In Game 2, Marcus Foligno surrounded Thomas Harley head-first into a stanchion, then bulldogged him face-first onto the ice. In Game 3, Dallas’ Jamie Benn delivered a flying cross-check to the again of Matt Boldy’s head, briefly knocking him out of the recreation, and Wyatt Johnston speared Kirill Kaprizov in the groin after Kaprizov took a swipe at a frozen puck in Jake Oettinger’s mitt. Then there’s Colin Blackwell’s clean-but-bone-rattling open-ice hit that injured Minnesota’s Yakov Trenin in Game 1; Trenin hasn’t performed since and is out for Game 4. Not to say Duchene touchdown on Marcus Foligno in Game 3, leaving Foligno bloodied and seeing pink.

Yet no Wild participant went after Benn. Harley went largely unavenged. Myers hasn’t answered for his elbow. Johnston appeared to apologize to Kaprizov virtually instantly, and by no means even bought as a lot as a facewash for the sneaky stickwork. And whereas Foligno took an offended swing at Duchene after Duchene went to verify on him, each guys basically apologized afterward over what they noticed as a large misunderstanding between pals.

“You could see the look in his eye when he got up, he didn’t care that it was me,” Duchene stated. “He was pissed. I don’t blame him after what he thought happened. I don’t take it personally at all.”

Well, OK, however why not?

Maybe 10 years in the past, this collection will get ugly. Twenty years in the past, there are most likely suspensions being handed out. Thirty years in the past, there’d be retaliatory low-cost pictures throughout the place.

Forty years in the past? This collection would have been a massacre.

But the league is completely different now. The recreation has modified. For the higher, if you happen to like pace and ability and charm and expertise. For the worse, if you happen to’re an old-school fan who used to disclose in the hatred. The historical past of the league, notably of the Stanley Cup playoffs, is etched in the scars on the faces of the gamers who lived via these actually heated — and sometimes scarily violent — battles of yesterday.

Think of how a lot the Chicago Blackhawks — gamers and followers alike — hated Minnesota North Stars legend Dino Ciccarelli in the Nineteen Eighties, and the way a lot Minnesota returned the favor towards Al Secord. Think of the Colorado Avalanche and Detroit Red Wings in the Nineties, with Claude Lemieux at all times at the heart of the malicious maelstrom. Think of Dave Bolland and the Vancouver Canucks in the late 2000s.

It’s simply not like that anymore. And it is virtually actually for the higher. We wish to see the finest gamers on the ice, not in the penalty field or, worse, on injured reserve. The recreation is quicker, higher and extra exhilarating than it is ever been. We’re actually in a golden age of hockey, the place superstars, not enforcers, are the focus.

Oh, positive, the league nonetheless has its villains — seemingly half of the gamers on the Florida Panthers roster revealed in being despised, notably Sam Bennett together with his handy penchant for falling on opposing goalies and Brad Marchand together with his lifelong knack for stirring up bother.

But the reality is, all people is aware of all people in the modern-day NHL. They share an agent. Or they work out collectively in the summer season. Or they’ve performed on so many groups that they have been teammates with half the opposing roster. Everybody’s buddies.

They did not was once.

When Wild radio broadcaster Tom Reid sees opposing gamers hugging and laughing in the expertise hall between locker rooms earlier than or after a recreation or chatting amiably at heart ice throughout warmups, all he can do is shake his head. When he was taking part in for the North Stars in the late Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies, that might have been unthinkable.

“I can remember being in Montreal, that’s when (enforcer) John Ferguson was there,” Reid stated. “Fergie, as one of their leaders, if he saw one of his teammates even talking to one of the opposition in a friendly way, you had to answer to John Ferguson. So nobody talked to each other. But now these players follow the money, wherever the money is, so they have a lot of friends on every team. ‘Hey, tell so-and-so I said hi.’ There’s no animosity between these teams anymore.”

In the regular season, for certain, friends stay friends. It’s quite common for a player to go out to dinner with his former teammates the night before a game against his old team. It tends to get a little frostier as the postseason draws nearby, and communication is typically cut off entirely between teams once they draw each other in a playoff series. But that’s more to protect the friendship than anything else.

The Wild and Stars “hate” each other. But they don’t really hate each other.

“I haven’t talked to (Duchene),” Nick Foligno said after Friday’s practice. “We each wish to win badly, so I’ll put that friendship on maintain. And I feel he understands the identical thing. Fifteen, 20 years in the past, simply on the whole, the recreation was a lot completely different. Much more nastiness. It’s not actual hate now. It’s extra a compete and a need. This staff’s making an attempt to remove a dream of mine, and vice versa. So I’ve sufficient ‘hate’ there for everybody.”

Duchene called it an “unspoken thing.” It’s not as if opposing players warn each other they’re going to go incommunicado before a series begins. It’s simply understood that, for these two weeks, friends become enemies.

“I’ve played against several guys the last few years in playoffs that I know well,” Duchene said. “I’ve been to their cottage or their home, they usually’ve been to mine. Our wives are pals. But that every one will get put apart for the couple weeks you are at struggle towards one another. It can get ugly. Then you get in the handshake line later, win or lose. It’s simply the way it goes. It’s easy for these two weeks. It’s all about the jersey you are carrying, and also you’re placing the friendships apart.”

But unspoken or not, effortless or not, it’s human nature that you’re not going to attack your buddy the same way you’d attack a mortal nemesis, the way Ciccarelli would attack a Blackhawks player, the way Lemieux would go after a Red Wings player. This Wild-Stars series has been an endless parade to the penalty box, but it’s been mostly for stick fouls — hooks, high-sticks, trips and the like. They’re what Stars coach Glen Gulutzan describes as “trying too hard” penalties.

There have been just five roughing minors — two of them to Marcus Foligno for the Harley incident — and zero fights through three games. Fighting is rare in the playoffs these days because teams are hyper-wary of putting their opponents on the power play. But even the post-whistle skirmishes have been pretty mild in this series, despite all the injurious hits and perceived cheap shots.

“If something happens in the game these days, (the animosity) might build up for a bit, but then it goes away — very quietly, it goes away,” Reid said. “I can not see pals combating all the time. That’s not going to occur. If you keep in mind, at the starting of this collection, everybody in the NHL hierarchy stated that this was going to be a massacre. But it is not been. It’s been very quiet for the most half. You do not see the animosity we have been all anticipating to see. Which just isn’t good for the followers. The followers prefer it, and I feel the gamers prefer it, too, once they get into it. But the downside is, “they’re friends with everybody.”

Reid stated that in his day, gamers revealed in the vitriol, that “it’s fun to be hated.” No staff personified that greater than the Broad Street Bullies, the brutal Philadelphia Flyers of the Nineteen Seventies. Reid admitted to sitting on the bench earlier than a morning skate and chatting with Flyers menace Bobby Clarke as soon as. But he wasn’t Clarke’s good friend.

Nobody exterior the Flyers locker room was Clarke’s good friend.

“Acquaintances, at best,” Reid stated with a snigger. “Are you kidding me? We all hated each other. On the ice, this was my livelihood, and they’re coming for it.”

The taming of the playoffs goes past participant friendships. Goons, guys who performed 5 or 6 minutes a evening and whose major function was to “protect” the stars and avenge them when obligatory, are a long-extinct relic of hockey’s previous. Fourth-liners at the moment are usually speedy gamers who inject bursts of power and ability into a staff or lockdown defenders who can play 12 to 14 minutes a evening and be trusted in tight video games.

And penalties are too expensive, energy performs too harmful. Dallas had three power-play targets in a 4-3 double-overtime win in Game 3. The final thing Minnesota desires to do is give the Stars extra alternatives to let Johnston, Duchene, Mikko Rantanen, Jason Robertson and Miro Heiskanen go to work, simply to ease their anger at Myers or Benn. Going after both of them is perhaps cathartic, but it surely is also seen as egocentric.

“With how many penalties are being called, it’s tough to go after a guy in the heat of the moment,” the Wild’s towering, bodily, fourth-line heart Michael McCarron stated. “You’ve got to remember what happened, and when there’s a legal way to do it, the right way to do it, things will get handled. Forty years ago, you could have gone after him and nothing would have been called. It would have been even, five-on-five. Now, and it’s not just our games, you can say whatever you want about the refs, (but) every single game is power plays all day long.”

Nick Foligno stated the Wild actually have clocked the Myers elbow and the Benn cross-check. And if there’s a chance to cleanly ship a message in sort, there’s little doubt they’re going to accomplish that. But there’s solely a lot they will do about it with the method the recreation is known as as of late.

“That’s the hard part now,” Foligno stated. “That’s where the league has gone, where you’re supposed to be policed that way, right? We get in trouble if we police it ourselves. That’s the s—-y part, is those things used to get sorted out properly, and they haven’t been. That’s the playoffs. You’re not going to complain about it. That’s just the way it goes. So it’s just on us not to focus on those two guys. It’s how do we get back at the Dallas Stars, “How do we get back at them and punish them on the scoreboard and in the win column and frustrate them that way? (Otherwise) you’re going to drive yourself crazy, and put energy where it doesn’t belong.”

Of course, in the old days, the Stars might have been looking over their shoulders, might have been playing with a nagging thought in the back of their minds that, at any moment, vengeance could come for them. That might have been enough to throw them off their game.

But not in the modern NHL. Referees no longer look the other way, even if a response might feel warranted. Fringe roster players aren’t expendable thugs, able to do their job by getting themselves tossed from a game. And friends don’t cheap-shot friends — even when they’re on a two-week break.

“Stuff’s going to happen in a series every now and then, and maybe something bad happens,” Duchene said. “When it is all stated and carried out, we’ll meet up for a beer once more or play a spherical of golf. For now, although, we’re enemies.”

Technically, maybe. But not spiritually. Not anymore.