“I don’t think it’s the officiating, no,” he said. “You can maybe keep the game under control a little more with what happens leading up to an incident. But I don’t think you can change the officiating to where it will stop the incident. It’s the mind-set of the players, absolutely.” — Dave Andreychuck (c), 3-24-04 St. Petersburg Times
With all due respect to Dave, but it’s not the players alone that should be held accountable over actions taken on ice. I don’t want to liken Hockey Players to children and Owners and executives to parents, but honestly — if you don’t discipline your child and send a message NOT to do something — they’ll keep doing it. If you keep sending an uneven message what not to do, they’ll keep doing it and exceed what they aren’t supposed to do.
If officials don’t step in and call all penalties that occur on ice EVERY time they are officiating a game, they continue to slip up and incidents occur on ice that are detrimental to the league.
Dave goes on to say “I believe the respect has to come back for the players to each other. We have to take it upon ourselves as players. I think it will be an issue this summer.”
Coming from a team captain, you have to respect the idea of players better respecting each other on ice… but lets think this through – every player has a different story and different pressures. Their amounts of respect for each other vary. If you don’t have some governing of the game — much better governing than what we are seeing now — then you cannot expect players to show each other respect on ice. Instead, they’ll continue the eye-for-and-eye tactic until it’s too late and something truly tragic occurs on ice because someone in the league office didn’t get the message across that they were the ones that levy punishments – not opposing teams.
