Translated material
Punitive measures
New rules will radically change the game
It's been a year since the richest and supposedly most progressive league in the world, the NHL, has introduced new rules. They, according to the innovators, must seriously reform hockey, make it more spectacular and productive. And indeed, last season confirmed that performance in the NHL has increased significantly. Now new rules, according to which the 2006 Olympics in Turin and the World Championships in Latvia were already held, have been introduced in Russia. Super League players and coaches had mixed reactions to the innovation.Reform is different from reform. This border has now been very subtly felt by the hockey players of Russian clubs, who took to their home ice in August and are now forced to play by new rules. The first two off-season tournaments, held in Ufa and St. Petersburg, showed: the referees are furious and do not miss a single reason to remove a hockey player. At first, this infuriated the players and coaches of the Super League clubs, who were unfamiliar with these innovations due to the lack of international experience.
Now snags, delays, blocking, and throwing the puck out of bounds are strictly punished. Both referees and players began to gradually adapt to the new hockey laws. At the beginning of these tournaments, many hockey players did not understand why they were being sent off. But, for example, at the end of the competition, which lasted almost a week, these same players already expressed complaints to the referees. Why, they say, aren’t opponents put on the bench for this or that new violation? By the way, the same thing is now happening at the Lada Cup in Togliatti, where after two rounds with two victories the hosts of the tournament are in the lead.
The coach of Khimik near Moscow, Pyotr Vorobyov, spoke categorically after one of the matches: “The referee simply did not let our team play. In this case, I'm not talking about bias, but about interpretation of the rules. It's simply incomprehensible to me. It was one thing when voices were heard calling to fight against grabs, hooks, wraps and blocking. This is understandable. But when you can’t even lift your opponent’s stick from below or simply put your stick on someone else’s, this is already nonsense. What kind of hockey is this? This is ballet! Yes, the judges will still amuse us. It seems to me that sometimes they themselves don’t know what they want.”
After the opening matches of the Chelyabinsk “Traktor” at the tournament in Ufa, the team’s head coach, venerable specialist Gennady Tsygurov, was no less categorical: “Yes, we must fight dirt in our hockey. All these hooks, grips, “forks”, and even more so “jackets” and “trains” are appendicitis that needs to be cut out. Where did we get all this from, how did it get to us? I analyzed for a long time and came to the conclusion that this infection began to spread throughout Russia in the early 90s, when the mass departure of our hockey players abroad began. The places of masters were replaced by lesser players, who filled in the gaps in technique with dirty tricks. I don't argue that holding and blocking fouls should be punished. However, a distinction must be made between mud and contact wrestling. Otherwise, it happens that during the entire first period we play without a single power combat, but there is a penalty time - 20 minutes for each team. I think the problem is that the judges simply haven’t adapted to the new rules yet. Although, perhaps, the hockey players themselves were simply not ready for them. Many of our players are bad at skating. You touch them a little, and they immediately fall. Canadians are much more stable when it comes to skating. The NHL doesn’t like malingerers.”
As delays and seizures are now judged, all ordinary fans could see while watching the matches of the Olympics in Turin and the World Cup in Latvia on TV. But now other innovations are coming into force. The main one is the removal of a player for any unimpeded throwing of the puck over the board. It gets to the point of absurdity: the player shoots at goal from the blue line, the puck flies above the plastic board, flying over a three-meter fence (1.25 meter side plus the height of plexiglass - according to the norms from 1.6 to 2 meters), and the “culprit” sits on the bench violators. These are, however, flowers. Now the referees, forced to obey the new directive of the International Ice Hockey Federation, are ejected for almost every touch of the opponent’s stick.
“I don’t understand the new rules at all,” says Togliatti Lada newcomer Alexander Guskov, a former defender of the Russian national team, a two-time national champion as part of the Yaroslavl Lokomotiv. - Now I simply can’t touch my opponent. I'm afraid to do this! As soon as you touch it, there’s a whistle. Well, I’m generally silent about throwing the puck. Now I need to retrain, and even for me, a professional, I think it takes two years, no less. That is, they simply want to leave us veterans without hockey.”
However, among the head coaches we interviewed there were also those who admitted that the new rules are a plus for Russian hockey. For example, Dynamo coach Vladimir Krikunov, who led the Russian national team last season, is all for innovation. “The NHL introduced new rules in October, and since January they have been in effect in Europe. “I know them and fully approve of them,” Krikunov assured. — Last season, my players played them at the European Champions Cup in St. Petersburg, and, by the way, Dynamo won that tournament. The Olympic Games and the World Championships in Riga were also held according to these, let’s call them non-contact, rules. And nothing, everyone slowly got used to it. Yes, many were indignant at first, but everyone reconciled. We ourselves used to play by these rules, and the judges punished hooks and grabs extremely harshly. But then, somewhere after the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo, the players slowly began to pick on their opponents, and the judges turned a blind eye to it. Well, recently, due to a lack of skill, defenders have begun to put forwards on the “barbecue”. Isn't that what the IIHF is fighting against? We must, I am convinced, we must strive for purity in hockey. In this case, agile attackers have more chances to score, and this is, of course, a plus for the spectators. So the example of the NHL in this fight turned out to be extremely positive. Or do you think that the same Ovechkin, in the pre-lockout period, would have been allowed to score 52 goals in his debut season?”