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JUNE 1, 2011
INTERVIEW WITH COLIN CAMPBELL AND BENDAN SHANAHAN
COURTESY NHL
THE MODERATOR: Colin is going to make a brief statement, then we'll
take some questions.
COLIN CAMPBELL: I think that Gary is right in announcing this now.
We talked about this a lot this past season. I approached Gary back in
March about supplemental discipline, and it was time to have a fresh look
and fresh eyes at the process of discipline.
When I first took this job over from Brian Burke, as we all know,
technology was at a different state than it is now. That was the most
difficult part of supplemental discipline and being consistent. It's a
competitive aspect amongst managers and teams regarding what's applied,
when it's applied. Now we have the ability to, up to the second almost,
monitor all games. The actual difficulty or challenge in supplemental
discipline is the actual process of making a decision.
We've always bounced this off the managers every year. Particularly
at this upcoming meeting, we reassess where we've been in supplemental
discipline, the hits, whether they be head hits, cross-checking, as Gary
said, the safety of players.
Our job, the League's job in discipline is to protect players from
players, and to make it safer. But also, as we said before a million
times, to keep the physicality in our game, which is a great part of our
game.
Having said that, this past season was a real challenge for Hockey
Operations and for all of us because we took the hitting in hockey to
another step. Last year for the first time in the history of the game we
said a legal hit, which was a legal hit in the past, shoulder to the head,
is not legal in certain areas or circumstances. That was the blindside hit
after the Savard Cooke and Booth Richards' hit.
We went to another area this year. And no matter how well we defined
it, how well we spelled it out, every time there was a hit, whether it was
your group or an extension of your group or whoever, players, coaches,
everyone: ‘This is a head hit; a 'head shot' you would call it, whether it
was a legal shoulder making contact with the head.
So it has been a process. If there was an injury in those
situations, it manifested itself further. It's an area we have to get our
arms around. With Brendan, Steve Yzerman, Joe Nieuwendyk, Rob Blake and
Rob Blake and Brendan have been part of Hockey Operations now, Brendan for
two years and Rob Blake this last year it's been really good having players
who just got off the ice and have a feel for it. And I think this is a
natural progression to move this over.
Brendan still has the assets or the capabilities of coming to our
group and bouncing them off our group no different than I bounce them off
of everybody. At the end of the day, someone has to make a decision. That
will be Brendan's job now.
Q. Colie, we know that Gregory takes taunts on the team about who
his dad is. Is that part of your decision to step down from this one?
COLIN CAMPBELL: No, not really. It's part of the game. He's having
fun playing now. I'm having fun, me and my wife, watching him play.
There are taunts in all aspects of the game. If you talk to the
people standing between the benches, they'll tell you what they hear on the
ice. There are no boundaries down there. That's just another area of some
of the things that are said. It's all part of the game, trying to win.
I think the fact that 13 years of this, I think it's an
all-encompassing job. It's hard to do other aspects of your jobs. When
something happens, we just don't look at it once, flip a coin, say is it
two, three or four? It carries you for a good day to two days. You want
to do the right thing for the players, for the game.
It's a job that needs, as I said to Gary, needs some fresh eyes, a
fresh look. I've been doing it for 13 years. You've got to get out of
that rut. I think it's got to move on.
It was no different in my other life when I was a coach. If you're
part of making a trade, you have all the input, and the general manager
made the final decision. In this case, I was a general manager, now it
will be Brendan. He'll take input from everyone and the final decision
will be his.
Q. Brendan, you've been around Hockey Ops enough to see that Colie's
integrity the last couple years has been questioned, every decision seems
to be second-guessed. Who is to say when you come in and Steve Yzerman's
team is playing, you obviously won a Cup with him, that people might say,
Well, he's looking at it this way or that way.
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: You assume that Steve and I are still friends
(smiling).
Q. Are you prepared to take this, as Gary said, thankless job and
everything that goes with it?
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: Well, first off I'd like to touch on that because
it has been described as a thankless job. I just want to say for the
record as a player that was disciplined under Colie on a few occasions, and
now having been honored to get to know him better and work with him over
the last two years, he does deserve and is owed a great deal of thanks by
hockey.
To think back when he took this job and how far he's brought this
role, the way that it's changed over the years from having videotapes
driven to him in snowstorms and meeting people on the sides of highways to
rush home and watch it on his VCR, to having the Situation Room that we
have now in Toronto, I think that history will show that Colie has been a
great innovator for the game of hockey, and we all do owe him a great deal
of thanks.
I can say that, again, I played against Gregory. Gregory is a
hard-working, honest, quiet player that plays tough. Colie was the same
way. He's that type of a person in the office, as well. He is respected
so much, and I respect him so much. I thank him for giving me the honor of
putting me in a position of having hopefully a positive impact on the
safety of the game of hockey.
COLIN CAMPBELL: You won't be thanking me next year at this time
(laughter).
Q. Brendan, what do you think your greatest challenge in taking this
job on is?
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: Well, I think the job itself. It's been described
to me many ways, quite honestly, by these guys. I think that in some ways
it's not a job that you go into thinking that you're going to be getting a
lot of pats on the back. But if you do it with the kind of integrity that
Colie has, and I believe you've got to be overinclusive, I think you have
to really draw from your experience, draw from the experience of others
around you.
I think that there's a great responsibility here. I think that the
game has never been played at a better level. I see that as just something
that's a great challenge. I don't know that every day is going to be an
easy one. I certainly was made well aware before I accepted the position
all the different hurdles that there are.
But, again, it's just very important to me. It's too important for
me to pass up an opportunity to hopefully have an impact on this great game
and on the players that play it.
Q. Do you think part of what you'll bring to the job is
communicating to players? Colie talked about the challenge of defining the
rules, the constant evolution of the rules. Will that be something that
you need to do going forward, just explaining to the players and the public
what you're doing, what your standards are, how you're trying to adhere to
them?
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: I think communication is going to be very
important. I think over the next few months I have an opportunity to
really listen and learn from a lot of people.
I think communicating with the players, I think communicating with my
peers at the NHL, and I think communicating with the NHLPA and some of my
friends there. I think it's just a matter of really building a consensus,
moving towards next season, using the next few months to sort of prepare
myself for when the season starts.
But I absolutely think that in this day and age constant
communication is important. I remember as a player you really don't think
about supplemental discipline until it's happening to you.
I think that I've sat through those meetings before where they sort
of warn you what is going to happen to you if you do these things.
Sometimes you're thinking about tomorrow night's game or the game in a
couple days or the game you played last night.
So it's a matter of my group staying on top of it, constantly trying
to reach out to people and communicate in that fashion.
COLIN CAMPBELL: I think one thing here that is important, Brendan
touched on it, is that a lot of people have comments about supplemental
discipline and thoughts on it. What's most important is the players and
how they feel about it and how they want to play the game and be protected
in the game.
When we first started, I said I just got out of the coaches ranks, as
Mike Murphy did. We brought in Kay Whitmore, Kris King who just retired,
we had a touch, a feel for it. And lately Brendan and Rob Blake have been
involved. It's very important to have, in the question you asked, Brendan
touched on it, to have that feel with the players, that understanding of
where they want the game to be and how they want it to be played.
We can all say all we want. The managers work hard on this. It's
important they protect their assets. It's also important how the players
want to play the game. That's something that both Brendan and Rob have
brought to our group the past year, two years.
Q. Brendan, as there's been so much more consternation lately on the
concussion issues, the blindside hits, I think the feeling from this side
of the podium is, when you get a guy who clearly breaks all the rules set
down, the suspensions haven't been as harsh or as long as many of my
colleagues and myself feel like it would need to be to stop the guy from
doing it again. Can we say that with you coming into this job, maybe
yesterday's three-game suspension will be tomorrow's five-, six-, or
seven-game suspension? Will it change?
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: I can't promise you how I'm going to view each
individual situation. I think it's important to state that I do love the
physical aspect of hockey. It's a very difficult and fine balance to keep
that in the game, to allow players to play on their toes, but at the same
time for them to know what they can and can't do.
I think that, as I said, over the next few months, communicating with
players, I think that it's up to me to take a lot of direction, ask a lot
of questions like you just asked me, and then when the time comes to make a
decision. If I feel that all of the criteria of a player trying to injure
another player has been met, then I'm going to have to act.
But I can't promise you what was once a three is now a seven. I
think that it's all going to be individual.
I will promise you that when I do make those decisions, I will try to
make my thought process and everything that went into that thought process
very clear and very visible to the entire hockey world.
Q. Concussions have become such a flash point, such an emotional
issue. Is there a way of curtailing it? Is there a sense of alarm and
concern, or do you view it as an overreaction in some quarters?
COLIN CAMPBELL: I think that's what we're trying to get our arms
around with this committee, group, department that Gary has put together.
We've worked on it. Kris King was delighted to send his 23 sets of
shoulder pads to Brendan's office a couple months ago.
There are so many different aspects to the game. I talked to an NHL
coach who just attended a tournament that his 11-year-old son was in in
Ontario. He said there were three concussions in two days. I remember
three concussions on my team when I played. Is it the speed of the game?
Is it the shoulder pads? We're more aware of it and players are prepared
to come forward? There's a number of factors.
So I think it's all-encompassing, not just discipline in how players
act or hit. I think that's something we've got to get our arms around. I
think that's something even the boards, the glass, everything. I think
that's something Brendan has been working on.
I don't know if you want to jump in there.
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: I just echo what Colie is saying. It's not any
one thing. I think it's part of several things put together.
Q. Brendan, the league has, for a couple years it seems, taken a
very kind of legalistic approach to supplemental discipline, where they'll
go through a rule word by word and apply it sort of frame by frame to an
incident. At times it seemed there's been a kind of pragmatic approach
missing. The Zdeno Chara hit may be an example, Ryane Clowe said of that.
He's not sure whether it's legal or not. That kind of hit, that kind of
injury, there should be something to send a message to players. Will you
try in any way to take sort of a more pragmatic approach, like big picture,
was it dangerous, was the player hurt, should the player have made it or
made it, regardless of whether it's legal?
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: I think we can all agree it's a difficult position
to be in. On the one hand, any time you have an injured player, and on the
other hand you have a player that is delivering a hit in a physical game, I
don't think that this is going to be easy. I think that certainly there's
an adherence to the rule book that's fair to the players. I also think
that instincts definitely play a part of this.
But I do believe that over the next few months, I've been thinking
about this since Colie and Gary approached me in March, but I do believe as
I build my team and build the whole Department of Safety, which will
include a lot of things, I think that all those questions will be sort of
answered in the next few months as we approach next season.
Q. Brendan, you said a couple times about building your team. Are
you planning to go out and find some people to work with that are not
currently with the NHL headquarters?
BRENDAN SHANAHAN: I'm open to that. But I think we've also got some
great people at the NHL. I plan on using all the resources that we have,
including our room in Toronto, including obviously Colie. He's done this
job for 13 years. I've reached out to Brian Burke. I've asked him his
impressions, his perspectives.
I think, like I said earlier, my intention especially in the
beginning is to be as over-thoughtful and over-inclusive as I can be. Then
it's just a matter of finding the right people and leaning on the people I
know that have had experience at this job. Quite frankly doing the very
best I can at a very difficult job.
