Give Matt Rempe this much: The kid certainly leads the league in discourse per 60. Never were so many words spilled over someone who played so little.
The 6-foot-7 Rangers rookie averaged the second lowest ice time in the league during his 17 regular-season games, at just 5 minutes, 38 seconds per game. In the playoffs, he entered Friday night’s Game 3 against the Washington Capitals still in the bottom 10 at barely 7 minutes a game. This is a fringe NHLer, a monumental figure but a middling talent. Yet he takes up more oxygen in the hockey ecosphere than Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews and Nikita Kucherov combined.
Rempe is the NHL’s Jupiter, and the rest of us are his moons, helplessly following him around, unable to break free of his massive gravitational pull. We cringe when he fights with two black eyes, worried about the inevitable concussion he’ll receive. We roll our eyes when he delivers yet another high hit, worried about the inevitable concussions he’ll dole out. Yet all the while we remain fixed and fixated on him, an oddity, a freak show of sorts, a curiosity we can’t quite quit.
And because he once again found himself a trending topic for all the wrong reasons on Friday night, we are legally required to add yet another breathless dissertation on the cleanliness of his play and the worthiness of his game to the pile.
(Sighs deeply.) Here we go.
This is a bad hit. Capitals defenseman Trevor van Riemsdyk didn’t have the puck when he was hit; that’s interference. Rempe started striding and accelerating toward van Riemsdyk, lining up his target, from the high slot; that’s charging. And Rempe elbowed van Riemsdyk in the head; that’s an illegal check to the head. Van Riemsdyk left the game with what the Capitals called an “upper-body injury.” That was inevitable.
It’s important to note that being enormously tall is not an excuse for being enormously dangerous. Rangers defenseman Jacob Trouba had to learn that. Capitals power forward Tom Wilson had to learn that. Rempe better learn it, or the league better do something about it, before someone does something even worse — and even stupider — to him.
The Rempe defenders mobilized quickly after his latest injurious hit — they’re pretty well-practiced by now. They pointed out that van Riemsdyk had just passed the puck away, so the hit wasn’t as late as it seemed. They saw the hit as largely through the body, with the head contact being incidental and unavoidable. They laughed and said van Riemsdyk should know better than to, uh, play the puck? They saw a cool, kick-ass hit. An old-fashioned board-rattler. Old-time hockey, baby. The way it used to be, the way it ought to be.
The TNT panel determined the hit was clean. NHL Player Safety will surely take a long look at it — they’ll even use a stopwatch to determine just how much time elapsed between van Riemsdyk passing the puck and Rempe pasting the player — but the expectation is the two-minute interference penalty Rempe received will be deemed sufficient. Hey, that’s hockey, right?
(Sighs deeply again.)
First of all, even though Rempe’s only been in the NHL for barely two months, he long ago lost the benefit of the doubt. He knocked New Jersey’s Nathan Bastian out of the game with a forearm shiver to the head on Feb. 22. He gave New Jersey’s Jonas Siegenthaler a concussion with a vicious elbow to the head on March 12. He blindsided Washington’s Beck Malenstyn with a shot from behind in Game 1 of this series. And now he’s injured van Riemsdyk.
These aren’t accidents. This isn’t coincidence. You can almost picture Rempe standing tall over the prone body of poor Charlie Banks, a shocked teammate asking, what did he do?! My job.
And hey, it’s hard to argue with the effectiveness of Rempe in those limited minutes. Knocking van Riemsdyk out in the first period left the Capitals with just five defensemen for the rest of the game, and the Rangers took advantage, took a 3-1 victory, and took a 3-0 series stranglehold as a result. He had Wilson — no stranger to crossing the line when it comes to delivering hits — on tilt, the veteran chasing the rookie around, begging for a fight, instead of, you know, trying to score. Mission accomplished for Rempe and the Rangers.
But is this what we really want? Is this cool, kick-ass hockey? Is this the way it ought to be? In an era of absolute superstars in which players such as McDavid, Matthews, MacKinnon, Kucherov and Cale Makar are doing things we never thought possible in the modern-day NHL, breaking records and taking breaths, do we really want lumbering menaces like Rempe roaming around looking for players to injure?
The big question here is isn’t whether Rempe will be suspended. He almost certainly won’t. No, the question is, is Rempe another brief but amusing New York fad like Giants quarterback Tommy DeVito, or is he the sport’s natural response to the rise of speed and skill around the league? Will he herald the return of fist-first fourth-liners who play six minutes a game yet manage 200 penalty minutes a year? Will the puck pendulum swing us back into the dark ages?
The NFL went to almost comical lengths to protect its quarterbacks; the league’s never been more popular. The NBA decided to all but eliminate the physical defense of the 1980s and 1990s and let its stars cook; the league’s never been more popular. The NHL is dangerously close to being spectacular and popular; better send in the Rempes.
The NHL needs to decide what kind of league it wants to be — one in which its stars run wild, or one in which the Matt Rempes of the world run wild. It can’t be both, because even in just six minutes of ice time a game, it’s only a matter of time before one runs into the other. It’s an easy call.
So you can probably guess which one the league will make.
(Photo of T.J. Oshie and Matt Rempe battling for the puck: John McCreary / NHLI via Getty Images)
