Follow-up on the Pronger Unsportsmanlike

While I fully expected the NHL to give some weasel-y explanation about why the call was "correct," I am a little surprised by how the hockey community in general has approved of the call.

Basically the rationalizations amount to "Pronger should know better", the call just "feels right" and captures "the spirit of the rule."

In my opinion, that is an atrocious argument.

Unsportsmanlike conduct isn't some all encompassing penalty where the referee can call infractions that "feel" right at the time. There are general precedents of types of behavior that warrant an unsportsmanlike penalty, and even for such behaviors, it has to be egregious or flagrant to be justify a penalty.

No type of goalie-screening has ever been a penalty until Avery's fairly wild display, and even then it didn't draw a penalty. After the game, the NHL made an impromptu rule change to stop Avery's antics.

Chris Pronger's actions don't come under that amendment. The NHL could've easily made a rule after the Avery incident that said "a player may not raise his arms for the purpose of blocking the goalie's eyes." They didn't. Clearly they chose to have narrow rule for a very specific situation. It's quite a stretch to call Pronger's momentary arm raise with his back to the goalie as equivalent.

Frankly, this type of intuitive judgment with little regard to the written rule is why NHL suspensions are such a mess and universally panned. Nobody knows what the hell is going on, and the NHL should be embarrassed to so directly change a result of a game with a novel interpretation of a rule.