Yesterday the Elite League announced that Riley Emmerson will be
banned for ten matches for a boarding infringement that had originally been assessed a two minute minor at 1:04 in the first period of Sunday's game between the Capitals and the Giants. Due to an injury on the play for Belfast's Kevin Phillips the "department of player safety" are obliged to review the play, which I totally understand especially when it comes to boarding/concussion incidents. However, there are a number of things that I just don't understand.
On Sunday, just after the game had finished the Capitals official twitter posted this:
If you are a Caps fan, you are hardly going to respond to this request. Emmerson isn't getting a knighthood if the video footage is reviewed. So even if you had filmed this on your phone you aren't going to make it available if you think it could result in your player being banned?
The next thing that confused me was the fact that some fans replying to the above request suggested that that incident had been seen on the webcast, now I'm no technology whizz-kid - seriously it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to embed these tweets - but surely there will be a recording of incident that would be sufficient for the purposes of reviewing the incident?
One conspiracy theory going about would be that the Capitals have the footage but thought they could pull a fast one and avoid Emmerson being banned if they refused to offer it, I simply can't subscribe to that as there has been nothing that the Capitals organisation have done to ever suggest that they would be that deviant.
After the announcement Ashley March (@marchhockey) published an excellent blog questioning the length of ban and the need for the league to make such a statement this early in the season:
Ashley is spot on the length of ban for an incident that cannot be seen is ludicrous, the only reason that I can foresee for this would be as follow: the league requests that all teams record game tape for the purpose of having a record of the game to allow them to review any plays, any denial by the club to provide this would be seen as an admission of guilt and the league punished the Caps accordingly. In addition to the ban the Caps were fined £1,000 and if they have broken rules then they need to be punished but why does Emmerson? A two minute minor was the penalty assessed for the incident so surely that is the matter closed, give the Caps a larger fine and as The Proclaimers say, "it's over and done with", right? Well, there are a couple of things to consider, first of all the EIHL has taken a long time to build a league with 10 respectable teams that can compete and would fining the Caps say £10,000 be worthwhile when trying to build a league with financial security? Probably not, I'm sure the Caps could afford the £1,000 fine but let's not kid ourselves this isn't the NHL that is a large amount of money for a team that gets a crowd of around 1000 punters every week. Secondly, you have to remember that Phillips suffered a concussion and will be out for a lengthy period of time, the
NHL Concussion Protocol states that there is no set return date but as a minimum the player "must be symptom free", so there's no telling how long he could be out, I mean Sidney Crosby missed the best part of two seasons.. what? He played last night? So he missed 59 minutes of hockey, of which he would probably play 18 of them, if he's lucky? He then traveled back to Belfast was assessed by a neurologist and then left to recover before being assessed again and cleared to play in 5 days? OK then.
I think what has happened here is the new men in charge have wanted to lay down a marker and set a standard of what they deem acceptable, but when you hand out bans for clubs not providing recordings of games surely you have set no standard whatsoever?
I think I'll give the final word to the hilarious @capsbanterarmy:
Buddy, I think you might need to make an exception this week.
