Okay... So the injury has been confirmed as severe. Whether its career threatening is yet to be seen, but here's why legal action should not be persued.
The McSorley case set an awful precedence, and heres why. On the street, I can't go out and hit someone with a stick. On the ice, if I hit someone with a stick, I get a penalty, if I do it in public, I get charged criminally. However, the body governing hockey, and the body governing the public, have traditionally been two seperate entities. As soon as I go on the ice, hit someone with a stick, and it begins to follow the same rules as public; I could lightly tap them with the stick, and still be charged - any unwanted physical contact; no measure of 'degrees of severity', no grey area (although we can all agree that there *is* gray area). So what about body checking? If I body check someone into a plate-glass window, versus body checking someone into the plexiglass, do I get charged both on and off the ice? How about a hockey fight, versus a real-life street fight; do I get charged in both cases? And, assuming I do, what do you do to boxing? Boxing is also independantly sanctioned, like hockey, but if you remove the borders in hockey, why not in boxing? By this logic, boxing should be outright illegal. Motor sports? Well, if you cant do it in public, clearly, you cant do it in sports; so speeding tickets all round, public mischeif, destruction of public property, endangering the public good, etc. The difference, here, in hockey and all other examples, is mutual consent.
Fact is, it was a cheap shot, paying back a cheap shot. Thats part of hockey, whether people like the extent to which it has gone or not. If you charge people criminally or ban them for life for a high stick, or a suckerpunch; how can you justify not doing the same for boarding penalties, hit from behind, slashing, or fighting? Even perfectly legal open ice hits, if they injure, would be subject to scrutiny under the tennents of law, if you begin to apply legal precedences overtop of traditional hockey precedences.
If I spit on someone, I get charged with assault and pay a fine. So, logically, if I get into a hockey game, and spit on someone, I suffer the same on the ice as I would off the ice. However, if I body check someone, or get into a fight, I'm liable to end up with more than just a fine - but pure responsibility for my actions, resulting in reparation payment and possibly even jail time; for something as small as a bump in the corner. Even if theyre not injured, thats the potential where this can go. Once you open the floodgates, theres no stopping it. You might say thats good, especially for cases like this, but in all likelihood it will ruin hockey.
People don't piss and complain whenever someone gets checked from behind into the boards and needs 40 stitches, or hit into an open bench door and breaks their ribs on the corner of the boards, or
blatantly kneed; but if its a sucker punch... well then, clearly its a whole different matter altogether. Certainly none of the previous are worthy of legal action, but this matter is, just as the McSorley case was since it was in no way nearly as severe as people would have let on - and to think, for one high-stick without permanent or adverse injury, he got banned for life. No 3 inch long scars, no permanent back or neck damage, no surgery required... Yep, clearly deserving of what he got.
I'm interested to see what they do with Bertuzzi, but I'm more interested to see the future hypocracy they lay upon themselves for the absolutely terrible inconsistency which is NHL rulings. If it were someone that noone's heard of before, I don't think the league would give a damn, but because its Bertuzzi, well... Doubtlessly, punishment will have to be swift and brutal, applied thickly where its never been applied before.
There have been a number of career ending hits, of various levels of underhandedness in the past decade. How can you possibly justify punishing them all differently, if punishing them at all? Please, explain to me how permanently destroying someone's knee and their livelihood is different from doing the same to someone's neck? My point is not that Bertuzzi didn't clearly try to injure him, I think we're all past the fact that he did; but I want to know how you can hate Bertuzzi so much and not give a rats ass about all the other shithead players who do the exact same things; and why Bertuzzi deserves to be punished exponentially more severely than any of the others? Please, indulge me.