from Ken Campbell of The Hockey News,

It’s not so much that Parros is a part of the department that handles league discipline or that he’s even the head of it. After all, the FBI often hires former hackers as cyber special agents. It’s that the league continues to fill this department with these kinds of players. With the exception of short stints by the likes of Rob Blake and Brian Leetch, I can’t think of any other former players who have occupied that department who have not been known for playing at times on the wrong side of the rulebook. And again, having the perspective those kinds of players bring can be a valuable thing. But why does it have to be so tilted in the direction of tough guys? Where are the likes of Marc Savard, Martin St-Louis and Brad Richards in this department? Richards just took a job in player development with the New York Rangers so it’s clear he still wants to be involved in the game.

The real problem is the fact that it really doesn’t matter who heads up or works for this department. The reality is that the league could name Lady Byng herself as the Director of Player Safety and nothing will change until the people who surround this position, many of them ex-players and tough guys themselves, stop exerting pressure on the department to skew things in favor of violence. The influence of ex-players is more prevalent in the NHL than it is in any other major professional league – to its detriment, in my opinion – and until the league rids itself of that mindset, we’re still going to see slashes and cross-checks to star players such as Sidney Crosby in playoff series defined as “hockey plays.”

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