Why NHL got it right with Gustav Nyquist suspension

The NHL suspended Detroit Red Wings forward Gustav Nyquist for six games on Wednesday after he intentionally hit Minnesota Wild defenseman Jared Spurgeon with his stick on Feb. 12.

But both Nyquist and the NHL agreed that he didn’t intentionally hit him in the face with his stick, which makes this ruling a bit fascinating.

As the video shows, Spurgeon cross-checks Nyquist in the back, rather emphatically. Nyquist wanted to retaliate, and what we all saw in that moment was a Red Wings player suffering a momentary lapse of sanity, sending his damn stick up through another dude’s damn head.

Six games was always the best educated guess, considering that’s what Duncan Keith of the Chicago Blackhawks received for his reckless whack on an unsuspecting Minnesota Wild face last April. That suspension included a playoff game for the NHL’s glamour franchise, which was frankly one step farther than we expected they’d go.

Again, it’s all about context with the Department of Player Safety. The system is what it is. And if Keith, given his history, gets six games (technically seven with the Playoff Multiplier) for his act, then there’s not much justification for putting Nyquist in the gallows, considering that Nyquist has never been fined nor suspended for stick-work. (He also doesn’t have a major penalty since 2013, a span of 277 games.)

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But that hasn’t stopped the reaction to the six games from being laughably hyperbolic. Like, sure, go ahead and compare this with McSorely on Brashear if your goal in life is to strip away every shred of context, history and injury from an incident to mold your wet-noodle argument into something respectable …

But OK, let’s go with the premise: Why wasn’t it more than six, beyond the constraints of the DoPS’s previous rulings?

There’s the player’s defense, and what actually happened on the play.

Let’s take the latter point, beginning here:

If you look at this video, you can see Nyquist’s stick hit the glass before his stick raises up into Spurgeon’s face.

Is he trying to, like, power up his weapon? No, he’s actually trying to do something completely different but also completely illegal with his stick.

The NHL, in the end, believed that Nyquist was trying to cross-check him back, rather than remove his eyes with his stick blade. But since having control of your stick is one’s responsibility, the NHL is still going to suspend him bigly for it, if not as bigly if it had been a straight jab to the Wild defenseman’s face.

And now you get to the final facet of the decision, which is what Nyquist said in the hearing.

Here’s what he said after the game against the Wild:

Now, that was never going to fly in the hearing. But according to one source with knowledge of the NHL hearing, Nyquist slayed it during his testimony: Explaining himself, acting contrite and taking everyone through the incident. He didn’t throw up his hands and claim it was all a misunderstanding; he said he was pissed off, wanted revenge, but screwed it up. If he was headed for a larger suspension, the hearing itself might have capped it at six games.

Again, it’s about the context: About previous rulings, about the incident, about the player himself.

If you want consistency, then six is right.

If you want emphatic, draconian suspensions that enter double digits for an act like this, then you want a complete reimagining of the Department of Player Safety, which is a whole different debate.

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Greg Wyshynski is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at puckdaddyblog@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter. His book, TAKE YOUR EYE OFF THE PUCK, is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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