It has been almost eight years since Georges Laraque and Andrei Nazarov fought each other for the last time, but the two former NHL heavyweights have found the spotlight for separate controversies. In Laraque’s case, it’s with his words. For Nazarov, it’s all about was his actions.
In Laraque’s soon-to-be released biography, The Story of the NHL’s Unlikeliest Tough Guy, Laraque says that both tough guys and star players used steroids during his 11-year NHL career. “Most of us knew who they were, but not a single player, not even me, would ever think of raising his hand to break the silence and accuse a fellow player,” Laraque wrote. “I don’t like snitches and will never be one.”
While Laraque doesn’t name names — in contrast to the storm Jose Canseco set off with his kiss-and-tell book about major-league baseball players using illegal substances — he issues a challenge for professional leagues to clean up their dressing rooms.
“Hockey, as well as any other sport in the world, has to take action against the human growth hormone that players have been using for a couple of years now,” he wrote. Bill Daly, the NHL’s deputy commissioner, said it would be inappropriate to respond. “No comment in a vacuum,” Daly said in an email response. “I would want to read the entirety of what Georges had to say before I commented.”
The NHL and the NHL Players’ Association did institute testing for performance-enhancing substances in July 2005 as part of the new collective bargaining agreement, but critics have questioned the effectiveness of the testing.
Nazarov, meanwhile, is in hot water in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League. Nazarov, coach of Vityaz Chekhov, attacked fans with a hockey stick following a game last weekend. Believed to be upset because a fan spit on him,
Nazarov grabbed a stick on the bench and swung it at fans over the glass separating the players’ bench from the crowd. After the stick snapped, Nazarov grabbed another one and repeated the trick. Nazarov was suspended for two games and fined 500,000 rubles — about $16,500 Cdn — for the incident. As ugly as the exchange was, it’s hard to say it was out of character for his team.
Vityaz Chekhov ranks last in the KHL’s Western Conference and is 22nd of 23 teams overall with a record of four regulation wins, four shootout wins, 13 regulation losses and one overtime loss.
The squad has developed a reputation for being a Russian version of Slap Shot. The league’s top three penalty-minute leaders play for Vityaz Chekhov: Christopher Brennan has 113 penalty minutes in 10 games, Jeremy Yablonski has 82 penalty minutes in five games and Nick (Nasty) Tarnasky, who has been in 245 NHL games, ranks third with 76 penalty minutes in 18 games.