Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Brad Marchand cross-checks MacDonald in the face, gets fined $5K (Video)

Screen Shot 2018-04-02 at 10.37.16 AM

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Brad Marchand has been disciplined by the NHL’s Department of Player Safety.

This latest punishment for the Boston Bruins forward is a $5,000 fine after cross-checking Andrew MacDonald of the Philadelphia Flyers in the face, because you can’t do that.

If you’re keeping tabs, Marchand has now been fined five times and handed six suspensions in his career. All total, he’s lost out on $879,522.61 in salary since 2011. It’s been a busy 2017-18 season for the 29-year-old as he’s now been fined twice and suspended once.
[Why Brad Marchand is NHL’s most frustrating player]

Marchand’s rep is getting tired around the league, as Marcus Johansson of the New Jersey Devils expressed last week following his return to the ice after suffering a concussion in January due to an elbow from the Bruins forward.

“It was stupid. There’s nothing else to say about it. I think there was no point in doing that,” said Johansson. “There was no hockey play whatsoever there. It’s sad to see that there are still guys out there trying to hurt other guys… It’s sad. It’s stupid. I hope it doesn’t come to him ending someone else’s career before it’s enough. It’s not why we play the game.”
[The 2018 NHL Stanley Cup playoffs begin April 11 on the networks of NBC]

Given his history in this field, that $5,000 fine -- the maxium allowable under the Collective Bargaining Agreement -- certainly won’t be the tipping point to change the behavior of a player making $8 million this season. While we’ll all scoff at the dollar amount, those parameters given to the DoPS are collectively bargained by the NHL and the NHL Players’ Association. The desire for stiffer fines and suspensions and “message sending” needs to come from both sides in order to give George Parros and his crew that power.

That fine money, by the way, will be put to good use as it benefits the Players’ Emergency Assistance Fund, which the Boston Globe did a nice write up on in 2014.

————

Sean Leahy is a writer for Pro Hockey Talk on NBC Sports. Drop him a line at phtblog@nbcsports.com or follow him on Twitter @Sean_Leahy.