It's time to consistently crack down on enforcers

	Past as prelude: Chris Simon of the Islanders is no stranger to acts of violence on the ice. Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
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Stop me if you'd heard this one before: Chris Simon, the hulking New York Islanders winger, tried to perform a Sher-wood lobotomy on Ryan Hollweg of the New York Rangers on Thursday night with a short, chopping, axe-like swing that got Simon an indefinite suspension but could also get him a belated invitation to spring training by a team looking for a designated hitter.

Hollweg took it on the chin and later returned, a reminder that suspensions can't be directly linked to the amount of time that player who was attacked is forced to miss.

Taking exception to being checked into the boards, Simon simply turned around and swung his stick in a blatant attempt to injure, which did get him tossed from the game on the night of the third anniversary of Todd Bertuzzi's criminal assault on Colorado's Steve Moore in Vancouver.

(Does the NHL have a terrific sense of timing, or what?)

The malfeasance all winds up in the lap of Colin Campbell, the NHL's vice-president for violence, as the league lurches from outburst to outburst. Campbell, a former defenseman and old-school guy (not in the sense of, say, Oxford or Cambridge or Harvard being old schools), seems to go by feel in these decisions, based on his experiences as a player and a coach.

There is not a sliding scale of justice in the NHL as much as no discernible scale, just the judgment - often smart, sometimes skewed - of a league executive. Hammurabi's Code, it ain't. Ottawa's Chris Neil received no supplementary discipline for his concussive late hit on Buffalo's Chris Drury last month. How late? Probably later than one-Mississippi -- while New Jersey's Cam Janssen earned three games for his even later and just as concussive hit on Toronto defenseman Thomas Kaberle on March 2.

If there is a pattern in these judgments, maybe you can spot something that many others can't. But there is another pattern that has emerged, at least since Marty McSorley stalked Donald Brashear as if they were acting out some PBS documentary of animals in the Serengeti. Consider some of the recent perpetrators:

McSorley, a veteran who made his way through the NHL, at least in part, on the basis of his fists.

Neil has become a versatile forward, skilled enough to play on any line, but his entree into the NHL was as a fighter.

Janssen is the enforcer on the cleanest team in the NHL, a player of limited skill who rarely sees more than five minutes of ice time per night.

Now Simon, who is not the brawler that he was early in his career, but who made his initial reputation as a fighter.

Maybe all the incidents, which move hockey briefly into the spotlight in the United States, are aberrations, random dots of irrationality that cannot be connected into some daisy chain of violence. In a collision sport, maybe there will always be lunatic moments. But judging by the recent cast of characters, there seems to be a link not to the act of fighting, per se, but to players who do, or have done, a fair bit of it. If players were tossed from the game immediately for fighting, the chances are that there would be fewer jobs for one-dimensional players like Janssen. At least some of the gratuitous violence might dry up.

The NHL has stayed the course, accommodating fighting, managing its role in the game relatively well, but as these crises continue apace, the league should perhaps reassess the role of enforcers. If it doesn't, the cementheads at the center of some of these incidents might be the cement blocks that drag the NHL to the bottom of the lake.