Enforces have been replaced by agitators, but what does it mean for the league?

If a player cannot score goals, they better be able to help stop them or enable someone else on their team to place the puck in the net. It is a pretty safe statement which no one would argue against.

We come to an article by Tommy Chalk of the Washington Post regarding the transformation of goons and enforcers into ‘rats’.

Chalk writes, “There is simply no longer a need for a towering enforcer that grinds out a couple minutes a game looking for a scrap,” and I wholeheartedly agree.

He continues, “They can reform, instead becoming penalty-drawing specialists, and some may have already chosen to do so. The benefit of drawing a penalty is simple: Your team often gets a power play.”

To continue the stream of thought, more power-play opportunities should translate to more power-play goals which then in turn convert into more victories.

At least that is the general understanding if not a true theory.

“If players can find that harmony between playing with an edge and playing with a head on their shoulders, more and more of those prototypical fighters will find a way to earn a paycheck while fights continue to dwindle”, says Chalk.

He also pens, “A large chunk of those guys are fourth-liners who know how to get under opponents’ skin.” He lists ten players with the best ratio of Penalties Drawn per 60 Minutes of play.

They are (in order of ranking), Nazem Kadri, Bobby Farnham, Cedric Paquette, Tom Wilson, Derek Doresett, Tommy Wingels, Ryan Carter, Kyle Palmieri, Scottie Upshall and Brendan Gallagher.

He gets comments from two players, Bobby Farnham and Tom Wilson.

Wilson is quoted as saying, “Teams need four lines to compete. You see teams that win the [Stanley] Cup. Every year they have four lines that can play. It’s too crucial a spot to have a forward play three minutes.”

Farnham adds, “The guys who can skate, the guys who can draw penalties, the guys who can play on your fourth line and do that kind of stuff. It’s going to be the age of the ‘rat’ almost.”

 But are these guys the goons and enforcers that Chalk was talking about in his piece?

Farnham may have fallen into this category in a past life. While it is early in his NHL career, he did rack up some 200-plus PIM seasons in the American Hockey League, despite standing at five-foot-ten and 188 pounds.

Paquette is slightly larger at six-foot-one and 199 pounds, but he amassed 153 PIM in a season in the AHL.

Dorsett accumulated almost 1200 total PIM through seven NHL seasons, plus 324 minutes over two AHL season.

Wingels, Carter, Upshall, Palmieri, Gallagher and Kadri do not fit the bit though. These guys, while they can be agitators, are not goons. None have had a season of more than 90 PIM.

That leaves us with the six-foot-four, 210 pound Wilson, and he will soon meet the 150-minute mark for the third straight season.

At best, you can say these guys are replacing the goons and enforcers and rightfully so. As Farnham pointed out, fourth liners need to skate and be able to pester the opponents. Make them take a penalty, and that's how your team's scorers end up converting on the ensuing power-play chance.

Coincidentally, another article was written on or about the same time regarding drawing penalties by the Toronto Sun’s John Matisz.

Now, he was not thinking in terms of converting thugs into rats, but he was emphasizing the importance of the rat to a team’s ability to get more chances on the power play.

He breaks it into two factors, good body positioning while keeping your feet moving at all times and being resilient. Players who draw more calls have these traits or skills.

What Matisz does differently from Chalk is that he factors out all the penalties taken by the player from his ranking. As he states, “Staying out of the box yourself doesn’t hurt either.”

His list (in order) includes, Kyle Palmieri, Charlie Coyle, Nazem Kadri, Brendan Gallagher, Sam Bennett, Nikolaj Ehlers, Johnny Gaudreau, Jason Zucker, Filip Forsberg and Zemgus Girgensons.

This list makes more sense to me, and if I were in a pool that used penalties drawn as a category, I would follow Matisz analysis.

There is one troubling item, though, and that is no one loves a rat long.

In Matisz article, he talked with Nazem Kadri about what he does to induce a call. Later that night, Kadri went a little too far and got called for diving, or as the NHL politely calls it “Embellishment”.

Whether it was in Kadri’s head that he had to do something to prove his comments in the article were legitimate, or if he would have normally done the same things that night if he were not interviewed at all we will never know.

He is quickly being labeled as a ‘diver,’ and all his hard work at inducing calls could end up backfiring on him. Future calls that should be going his way could end up being ignored by referees.

A Yahoo! Sports Puck Daddy column had Colin Campbell saying “It’s not about penalizing the player. It’s about educating the referees to watch out for those guys.” Basically do not fall for their theatrics.

When I tried to find more research about players that get caught embellishing, the NHL site was not too helpful. I did find a few lists of players who were suspended. The site Scouting the Refs had records for the 2014-15 and the current season but it was slightly out of date.

They have Farnham, Wilson and Ehlers as suspended divers.

CBSSports.com has a way to list miscellaneous penalties which includes a column for Dives but when I searched it, Kadri was not tagged with a diving call. I am not sure why he was absent?

The ESPN site was not much better. They break penalties down to Majors and Minors, but again, I could not ascertain who had been given diving penalties. I am guessing they were labeled as unsportsmanlike conducts under majors.

Guess who is a leader in unsportsmanlike calls? Tom Wilson. (Dorsett comes in third).

In the end, you'll want to be careful when it comes to rats. They can make you look bad when you don't win any cheddar.