Respect among players has gone down in the NHL

I’m glad I grew up in an era where I could watch a guy like Scott Stevens play. Truth is, if he played today, he would likely be suspended right now. A lot of people loved watching him lay people out. Were some of those hits dirty? Probably. But the majority were guys who had their heads down.In my opinion, they deserved to get hit, they still do. They start teaching in Timbits to skate and stickhandle with your head up. These guys are the best in the world, they should be able to handle it.

If someone elbows someone in the head, by all means, take the appropriate action; and I’ll tell you something else, if Scott Stevens wore the equipment that is worn today, Eric Lindros and Slava Kozlov would likely be dead right now. Was Stevens considered a dirty player? No, he was a great defenseman, a great leader , punishing hitter and in the end a Hall of Famer.
The NHL claims to want to protect their stars. Crosby, Toews, Sedin, Alfredsson, Bergeron, Miller, Hossa, Savard,  Skinner. Any combination could be your 1st team all-stars. Is your protection plan working Gary?
I saw Gretzky get hit once, Lemieux never got layed out, Brett Hull, can’t recall, Messier, nope. Yzerman- not a chance.
Why? Because there were guys on their teams named Semenko, McSorley, McCrae, Domi and most notably Probert.
You messed around with the stars, you had to pay a price that not many were willing to pay and as a result, none of those guys were ever sidelined with concussions from a cheap shot.
Now you got guys suited up in armour (as Don Cherry pointed out more than once) running everyone because if someone throws up a cheapshot, you can’t do anything. If you do, you get a penalty, he doesn’t. They score on the PP, you lose the game, and you miss the playoffs by one OT loss because now we give points for losing the game.
They over analyze every hit now- north, south, east, west. You can hit him 0.5 seconds after he gets rid of the puck, but if its 0.7 or 0.8 seconds, you’re the dirtiest goddamn player in the game. You expect these guys, in the heat of the game to distinguish hitting a guy by 0.3 seconds? What a joke.
They can regulate goalie gear, why can’t they regulate the players? Make it safer to give and take clean bodychecks.
Get rid of that flipping instigator rule. You mess with a star, let the offender be dealt with right then and there. Its over, everyone moves on. Now they can’t, it festers to a point where weeks down the road, a guy’s thinking “hey, we’re up by 5 goals, I’m gonna get him now or better yet, I’ll take a shot at their star because they have no tough guy and we’ll get the PP.”
Respect has gone down in the league because the rules support it going down. Tough guys are becoming a dying breed and the stars will be the ones to pay the price for it. Scott Stevens was both a star and a tough guy, but he wouldn’t have been a Stanley Cup Champion or Hall of Famer in today’s game and that’s a sad fact from my viewpoint.
In the words of a wise man named JR, ” Wake up NHL, wake the f*&* up.”  And hopefully the alarm clock will go off sooner than later.