A lifetime ban for Marty Lavins would be a joke, and the people typing it from a shaky phone clip know it. The real outrage is that four days after Parker Lalonde was carried off Lawler Arena on a stretcher, Hockey East hasn't told anyone whether it even bothered to look.
Start with what happened. Thursday was Merrimack's home opener, the night the Warriors raised the banner for their first Hockey East tournament title. They tied New Hampshire 3-3 and took the extra point in the shootout. In overtime, Lalonde, a sophomore who led Merrimack last season with 37 points, got hit by UNH senior captain Marty Lavins near the penalty boxes and went down. Medical staff worked on him for several minutes before he was taken to a hospital.
The news since then has been good. Merrimack officials said that night Lalonde was alert and awake. He was released from the hospital Friday morning. Coach Scott Borek has said only that his player "will be out for a bit." No diagnosis has been made public, and I'm not going to invent one.
This is where the mob loses me. A permanent ban is the heaviest thing this sport can hand down, and you don't hand it out because an outcome scared you. Hockey is a collision game. Big hits that end with someone hurt aren't automatically crimes, and a senior captain's career isn't something you torch off a ten-second video and your own gut. If there's a case that Lavins did something dirty, make it with evidence. Nobody has.
The only person on record characterizing the hit is Steve Souza, the UNH coach, who said, "It's unfortunate. I thought it was a clean hit. Lalonde's a great player and hopefully he's OK." Of course he said that. It's his captain and his program. It's the defense attorney's opening statement.
And it's the only statement anyone has offered. No penalty was called on the play. As of this writing there's no reported ejection, no game misconduct, no supplemental discipline, and no announced review from the officiating crew, the two schools, or Hockey East. A kid left the building in an ambulance, and the governing body of the league he plays in has said nothing about the play that sent him there. They haven't said they're reviewing it. They haven't said they looked at it and it was legal. They've said nothing at all.
That silence is the failure here. Merrimack hasn't publicly called the hit dirty, and I'm not going to pretend their quiet means they agree with Souza. But somebody with authority and no stake in the outcome needs to watch this at full speed and half speed and tell the public what they saw. When a player gets hospitalized, you don't get to let the clock run and hope the internet moves on.
So pick the right target. Lavins shouldn't be banned for life, or even suspended, on what's in front of us right now, a scary result and one coach's word. Demand the review instead. Hockey East owes Lalonde, Lavins, and everyone who watched him get stretchered off something louder than a crowd of strangers guessing. Four days of silence is the dirtiest thing about this whole night.
