Dan Sanford

Sports Editor

das6267@psu

Boston Bruins winger Brad Marchand is the latest player to be issued a suspension from the NHL’s Department of Player Safety after a dirty trip on Vancouver Canucks defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson on Sunday. He will miss the Bruins’ next three games.

Alarmingly, Marchand’s offense is already the fifth such offense league-wide after only about a quarter of the season completed. The trip levied on Ekman-Larsson is an especially dangerous type called a slew-foot, where the offending player sweeps their own leg between a target player and trips them with the offender’s own leg. This can much more easily lead to injury and now almost always results in supplemental discipline. What has left fans and other players displeased, however, is the consistency and potential double-standard held by the Department of Player Safety, or DoPS.

Each time the DoPS issues suspensions, a video explanation is provided for the public’s convenience to show the department’s judgment. In Marchand’s, it mentions his prior history as a factor. Marchand has long been considered a dirty player, and this is his seventh suspension in his 11-year career. It is his second for slew-footing; the last suspension for this conduct was issued in 2015, and he once held the infamous nickname of “Leg Sweeper” as he was frequently penalized for this type of play before DoPS began cracking down on these trips. Until Monday, Marchand had stayed out of any disciplinary trouble for the past three years, as this was his first supplemental discipline since 2018, but apparently DoPS holds special judgment for Marchand.

On the other hand, three of the season’s five slew-foots have been committed by the same New Jersey Devils player: defenseman P.K. Subban, who has since earned the nickname “Slewban”. In two separate incidents in games against the New York Rangers, Subban injured Ryan Reaves and Sammy Blais with slew-foots that could easily have been avoided. The Blais offense resulted in Blais tearing his anterior cruciate ligament – or ACL – in his knee, and he will not return this season. The Reaves incident occurred in the preseason and Reaves missed a few of those games, but returned to the lineup in time for the season start. Subban’s other offense came at the plight of the Calgary Flames’ Milan Lucic, who fortunately was not injured.

The problem here is that Subban was not suspended for any of these incidents. Each drew a response from the DoPS, but all three incidents were judged that a fine would suffice as punishment. The NHL’s collective bargaining agreement, or CBA, caps out his maximum allowable fine at a measly $5,000, paling by comparison to his $9.5 million per year salary. Marchand was banned for three games for his first disciplinary issue in three years, but Subban can apparently do the same thing three times in a month and keep playing hockey in exchange for pocket change.

The other player disciplined by the DoPS was San Jose Sharks forward Kevin Labanc. Labanc was suspended for one game after tying legs with St. Louis Blues forward Tyler Bozak. Many fans and NHL pundits believed that the incident was an accident and thus should not have been suspension-worthy, and only further illustrates the double standard DoPS has when choosing corrective action for their offending players.

Across his career, Subban has been fined six times for disciplinary offenses. He has never been suspended. If this keeps up, perhaps there could be a change in department leadership for player safety.