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I'm noticing a controversy brewing over the interpretation of a fatal collision that occured at a hockey game recently.
What's interesting to me is that every mainstream site reporting on this issue that I clicked on refuses to name the player responsible for the death, Matt Petgrave, and always refers to the incident as a "freak accident," rather than something more neutral, which I have attempted to do so far. The guy who died is Adam Johnson.
On 4chan you see people posting the video and saying it's intentional. On reddit you see some removed comments and people wondering whether neck guards will be mandatory now. One comment I saw did mention that it looks intentional, but actually isn't, if you think about it. I haven't played hockey, so I feel I'm not in the position to speculate how "freak" of an accident this is, but, from the video, it does look like an intentional manoeuver.
Oh, yeah, Petgrave is black, and hockey is one of the whitest sports around. I recall in recent years the NHL making some abortive attempts at being more woke that didn't go over well with the players or the fans, but someone who knows more about hockey should add context for the rest of us.
I'm not the one that should be making this post, but no one else has! So I must.
I finally caved and watched it. I had seen Malarchuk, I had seen Zednik (much less worse), wasn't particularly interested in seeing this one until I became aware there was a debate over whether it was intentional or not.
Do I think Petgrave deliberately kicked him in the throat? No. Do I think he deliberately raised his leg? That's harder to say. I play hockey and I flatter myself into thinking I have a generally decent understanding of this sort of thing. It's really, really difficult to try and parse intent by slowing down a video frame-by-frame. Hockey is a very fast sport and these sorts of collisions occur in fractions of a second. It is extremely tempting to read into these sort of things more than is actually there.
A little bit of background: about 15 years ago pro hockey started cracking down on hits to the head. There were a rash of bad concussions to high-profile players like Sidney Crosby and the general rumblings about the concerns of CTE, so the NHL, fans, and the general public were supportive of further restricting what was legal. (Before you could more or less hit people in the head without getting penalized, provided you did not commit another penalty in the process - this resulted in hits like this being entirely legal and generally celebrated). Before players were generally held to be responsible for themselves - don't want to get hit in the head? Don't skate through the neutral zone with your head down. Now the onus was reversed; it was the responsibility of the player hitting not to target their opponent's head.
This created two general trends: first, since the ban players have been generally less "heads up" in their play. It used to be keeping your head up was important for not getting concussed by the meathead on the other team; now you can more safely watch the puck while you're stickhandling. Part of the reason Johnson gets caught in the neck here is that he's looking down as he comes across the blueline (previously a very risky move), and so he's both unaware of the player coming at him and more crouched over.
Secondly, it has created a professional and hobbyist enthusiasm for watching slo-mo videos. In order to determine whether a hit merits a suspension, the league would look over video repeatedly from different angles and with different speeds trying to parse intent, and when they would announce the results of an inquiry they'd produce a handy film, JFK style (example). Similarly every time there's a big hit in the NHL you will see on social media fans poring over every frame trying to prove or disprove intent to injure. Very frequently you will see very absurd manipulations by fans to try and conjure up something that isn't there. A favourite tactic is to slow down the video before impact, and then speed it up at impact; this gives the impression of more deliberation by the hitter and a more violent impact.
So for Petgrave's hit: no I can't say for sure either way. It looks somewhat suspicious; he may well have been trying to stick a leg out to sort of block or hamstring Johnson. He might have lost his balance. He might have been trying to stick a leg out and then lost his balance. I think it would be fair to rule out any deliberate intent to hit Johnson so high, but whether the play itself was dirty I feel like I could be convinced either way.
What this incident reminds me of is a play about a decade ago where Matt Cooke, notorious head-hunter, severed the Achilles' of superstar Erik Karlsson. This was another incident where a notoriously dirty player injured a star, and there was an intense debate over the time whether it was deliberate or accidental. The discussion on it was inevitably coloured by the reputations of the two players.
What's wild about the Matt Cooke incident is that Cooke was never suspensed.
With Matt Cooke, there is at least a plausible explanation that it was a typical attempt at a typical play that ended up being screwed up as a huge outlier. Going into the boards like that, it's extremely common to "ride" the opponent into the boards. You're not trying to lay a huge hit on their upper body; that would be boarding and illegal. Your main decision is, do you 1) Hold back, not really make contact at all, and then try to read whether they break left/right so that you can follow them, or 2) Ride them into the boards and try to control their body so that they can't break left/right in an attempt to get around you. (2) happens all the time, and usually without incident. The typical thing to do when you have someone against the boards and don't want to let them escape in either direction is to pin your knee hard against the boards, right between their legs. You raise it up a little bit; it's like up in their crotch. Your plant foot is literally pushing your knee hard into the boards. To explain why this is effective, imagine being the offensive player. You can't cross your feet over to turn in either direction. You can't push off hard in either direction. They're literally preventing your legs from being effective at moving your body laterally. Typically, the goal of the offensive player is to use their arms to push as hard as they can against the boards, moving the defender a foot or two away from the boards, so that you again have room to maneuver. I have personally played this exact situation hundreds of times, and as a defenseman, I was usually in the role of trying to control the offensive player's body, but I have definitely done both sides in drills. I've done it as the offensive player against guys who are much larger than me, and can viscerally tell you how hard you have to push against the boards to get them to move a few inches in order to give you room to make a break in one direction or the other (or even just room to get your stick/foot on the puck to slip it out to one side or the other to your teammate).
Matt Cooke's knee may have been a little bit of an outlier high as he was trying to ride, and he obviously got his skate not directly between Karlsson's legs, up above the tendon guard and off to the side too much. Was it in part because Karlsson was already trying to change directions, and Cooke didn't read it/couldn't follow in time? Was it that Cooke is a criminal who found a way to cleverly disguise his criminal intent? Who flippin' knows. But the whole thing is actually so close to a legit hockey play that I would be likely to believe the result of the league's investigation, especially considering Cooke's reputation and Karlsson's value to the league. All the pressure would be to finding guilt of intentionality if at all possible.
I didn't look super long, but I didn't find a video that showed this whole thing in its entirety. They were all cut to miss a lot of the critical portion. However, skates almost never come up anywhere near that high unless someone completely blows a tire and completely loses control of their body. Would a better video show me that dude actually was just trying super hard to change directions, blew a tire, completely lost his balance/control of his body, and went flying head over heels? Possibly. But you almost never see anything that looks remotely like that in any regular play, not even examples of guys who look silly because they get juked out of their shorts and completely topple (away from any necks). I would expect an investigation would look into all of this, including questions like, "Did he play an outsided number of minutes so far in the game; was he super late on a shift?" If dude was just extra gassed, it's possible that he really did just completely lose it, trying to change directions in a way that he would normally be able to do, but just wasn't capable of at that time, and completely sillyfied himself. Who knows.
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