Yzerman rips rules: 'It's not hockey'

Yzerman rips rules: 'It's not hockey'
BY HELENE ST. JAMES
FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER

November 19, 2005

EDMONTON, Alberta -- Red Wings captain Steve Yzerman has played 13 games in the new-rules NHL. He would like to see some of the old NHL back.

"Everybody keeps saying this is great. It's not great," Yzerman said. "It's not hockey."

Yzerman spoke in the visitor's room at Rexall Place just minutes after the Wings had suffered a 6-5 overtime loss that left them winless in their past three games. Yzerman was particularly irked by a holding penalty Mathieu Schneider was assessed midway through the second period, but overall his comments weren't directed so much at that loss as toward the quality of the games overall.

"There are penalties all over," he said. "I'll just use Mathieu Schneider's penalty as an example. He steps up and takes his guy out, and his stick gets caught and the crowd cheers so the referee puts his hand up. There has to be some discretion. The referees have to use some judgment on what is a penalty and what is not. They've taken judgment out of it and I think it's somewhat made it easy on the referees just to call anything, because there is no judgment.

"Good referees used to have good judgment. Now they've taken that out of the game. I'm not saying I'm blaming the referees for it, I just feel the whole thing has to be adjusted and they have to look at this seriously. They can't continue to call irrelevant things that have no business being called."

The NHL garnered a great deal of attention in the summer when it instituted new rules designed to eliminate the hooking and holding that had slowed the game down to a grinding, boring product that struggled to draw fans. Yzerman's teammate Brendan Shanahan was a leader in what eventually became the competition committee, a group of players and management. In October, he told the Free Press the new rules, "are not an invitation for soft hockey. We felt that hooking and holding was preventing body checks. There was no need to body-check anymore when the smartest thing to do was just go put a stick on a guy."

NOTEBOOK: The Wings return to Joe Louis Arena tonight to play the struggling Blues, which could be just the balm needed after an 0-2-1 trip. "It's a good eye-opener this road trip, it really is," Yzerman said. "We've found out a lot about our team and where we need to improve and how good some of the competition is out there. We've obviously got a lot of work to do. Our entire game has to improve." ... Because they play tonight, the Wings spent Thursday night in Edmonton, and flew home Friday. .

Contact HELENE ST. JAMES at 313-222-2295 or hstjames@freepress.com