An excerpt from Ed Willes’s new book: Todd Bertuzzi became the face of the game after the photograph of him winding up to punch Steve Moore on March 8, 2004, went viral.
More than 20 years later, it remains hard to process everything that happened on and around March 8, 2004. (Todd) Bertuzzi was vilified in mainstream news outlets across North America and became the face of a game that was out of control. (Steve) Moore had suffered three fractured vertebrae in his neck. The question wasn’t whether he would play again, but whether he would lead a normal life. It was a story on CNN. It was a story in Time magazine. It was on the cover of Maclean’s. Prime Minister Paul Martin offered his opinion. The picture of Bertuzzi winding up to punch Moore was everywhere.
At this juncture, we feel compelled to make a point. This book is written through a Canucks lens, and there’s a bias toward the Canucks’ point of view. Steve Moore suffered a serious injury. He was a victim, although the extent of his victimhood is a subject of some debate. If anyone wants to write his story in detail, they’re welcome to do so. But our concern here is the impact on the Canucks and Bertuzzi, both in the incident’s immediate aftermath and the interminable legal entanglement that followed.
The next day was the NHL trade deadline and (general manager Brian) Burke had to make a quick determination. There was some school of thought that Bertuzzi would be suspended for the next 10 games or the final 13 games of the regular season. The Canucks were also aware his punishment might include the playoffs, and as Burke says: “That’s a completely different equation.”
At the deadline, Burke traded for veteran forwards Martin Rucinsky and Geoff Sanderson and veteran defenceman Marc Bergevin. The day after the deadline, a weeping Bertuzzi held his famous press conference in which he apologized to Moore, the Canucks, Burke, (John) McCaw and any kids who might have been watching. Earlier that day, he flew to Toronto with Burke for the disciplinary hearing. That night, the Canucks played the Wild to a 1–1 tie.
The next day, March 11, the NHL announced Bertuzzi was suspended for the rest of the season, including the playoffs, and the Canucks were fined an additional $250,000. That led to a Burke press conference in which he lashed out at the NHL for the fine and the media for “crucifying my player.”
It’s exhausting just typing it. And that was only the first three days after the incident.
“I had no problem with the NHL’s punishment,” says Burke. “I didn’t think it fit the crime, but they were in a tight spot. The optics were terrible. The footage of it was everywhere. They had to come down hard.”
As for the deadline-day trades, he says: “You have to know what’s in the pipeline and what deals are available. If you do your homework, you know the players who are available. There’s no question we had to make some hard decisions in a short time, but that’s part of the job.”
Not surprisingly, the Canucks went into a tailspin after Bertuzzi’s suspension was announced, going 1–4–1 over their next six games. But beginning with (Dan) Cloutier’s 1–0 shutout win over the Kings at home, they ripped off six straight wins over the final two weeks and caught Colorado for first place in the Northwest. The two new forwards didn’t add a whole lot. Rucinsky had one goal and two assists in the 13 games. Sanderson went 3–4–7. But (coach Marc) Crawford says the biggest acquisition for the team was Bergevin, who was a journeyman player but a Hall-of-Fame jokester.
“We needed someone who was going to loosen up our team, because we were so tight,” says Crawford. “I remember our first meeting. He was hilarious. Our guys took to him right away.”
The winning streak earned the third-seeded Canucks a meeting with the sixth-seeded Flames in the opening round of the playoffs. It was a tight, back-and-forth affair in which the Canucks opened a 2-1 series lead, fell behind 3-2, then forced a Game 7 with a gritty triple-overtime win in Game 6 in Calgary on (Brendan) Morrison’s goal.
In the deciding game, (Jerome) Iginla gave the Flames a 2-1 lead midway through the third. When (Ed) Jovanovski took a penalty with 27 seconds left in regulation, the Canucks looked finished. But with goalie Alex Auld out for an extra attacker, (Markus) Naslund rushed the length of the ice, drove the net and (Matt) Cooke scored with six seconds left, sending the game into overtime.
Great. That just set the stage for more heartbreak. With the Flames still on the power play, ex-Canuck Marty Gelinas scored the series winner eight seconds before Jovanovski’s penalty expired.
No one knew it at the time, but a lot of things ended with that goal.
Two weeks after the Game 7 loss, Burke was let go by the Canucks. Technically, he wasn’t fired. His contract wasn’t renewed. “Funny,” he says. “It felt the same way to me.”
There’s a perception that the loss to the Flames cost Burke his job. He now says it didn’t help. But his fate was determined long before Gelinas’s goal.
“I remember I gave an interview in February where I called myself a lame-duck general manager,” Burke says. “Stan (McCammon) calls and says, ‘You’re not a lame duck. We haven’t decided what’s going to happen.’ I said, ‘Stan, don’t insult my intelligence. We haven’t talked about a contract since the start of the year, I know I’m gone.’ ”
On May 3, McCammon made one of his few public appearances at the press conference after Burke’s dismissal. In a cringeworthy performance, he said: “It’s my belief we’re better served looking at the future and saying we’re prepared to move on. We’re comfortable in our assessment. I’m not going to comment on the specific factors of this decision.”
Dave Nonis, a Burnaby kid who’d been Burke’s right-hand man the previous six seasons, would be appointed GM days later. As for his relationship with Burke, McCammon said: “The conjecture about my relationship with Brian is way off base. I’ve had a very good relationship with Brian.”
Sure, Stan.
In his book, Burke’s Law, the former Canucks GM offers this description of his relationship with McCammon: “(By the end) McCammon and I were dysfunctional. Stan was resentful of anyone who got credit for anything on the hockey side or the business side, especially if it was me.”
At his final meeting with McCaw, Burke told the owner: “If you’re going to start getting rid of people who aren’t producing, you’d better get rid of Stan too, because he’s useless.”
Three years later, Burke would hold the Stanley Cup over his head in Anaheim. The Ducks waltzed over the Canucks in the second round of the playoffs that spring.
Bertuzzi’s story took a little longer to resolve — a decade, to be precise. In the days, weeks, months following the incident, he was under attack from all sides. There was the media coverage. There were the court cases. And for all that, the greatest weight was the guilt Bertuzzi felt. He could hide from the media and, to a certain extent, the courts. But he couldn’t hide from his conscience.
Naslund, Bertuzzi’s closest friend on the Canucks, tried to help.
“I tried but I could never grasp what was going through his mind,” says Naslund. “He had to live with it the rest of his career and his life. I tried to support him as best I could, but it was tough. I think I could have done more.”
In June 2004, charges were laid against Bertuzzi in British Columbia for assault causing bodily harm. He pleaded guilty and was given a conditional discharge with 80 hours of community service. In 2004-05, the owners locked out the players, and many NHLers went to Europe to ply their trade. The IIHF, however, extended Bertuzzi’s NHL suspension to their jurisdiction.
Ultimately, he would be suspended for 17 months before he was reinstated by (NHL commissioner Gary) Bettman in August 2005. Measured by games, it was the fifth-longest suspension in NHL history, and it cost Bertuzzi over half a million dollars in salary, an estimated $350,000 in endorsements, and a similar amount in lost European wages.
Then there was the civil suit. In February 2005, Moore filed in Colorado, naming Bertuzzi, Brad May, Burke, Crawford, the Canucks organization and Orca Bay as the defendants. In October 2005, a Colorado judge ruled the case should be heard in Canadian courts because Bertuzzi and the other defendants were Canadian citizens. In February 2006, as Bertuzzi was suiting up for Team Canada at the Winter Olympics, Moore filed a suit in Ontario seeking $15 million for loss of income, $1 million for aggravated damages and $2 million for punitive damages. Moore’s parents also sued for “negligent infliction of nervous shock and mental distress.” The price there was $1.5 million.
The suit would change shapes and sizes several times before it was finally settled in August 2014. By then, Moore was seeking $68 million in damages. While the terms of the settlement were never disclosed, Bertuzzi says in 2023: “I’m glad Steve is healthy and he’s got lots of money.”
The hockey part of this story was equally consequential for Bertuzzi and the Canucks. As part of the lawsuit, Bertuzzi testified that during the second intermission of the March 8 game Crawford told his team Moore had to “pay the price.” Crawford and the Canucks denied Bertuzzi’s testimony, which led to Bertuzzi filing a complaint against Crawford in which he claimed he was contractually obligated to follow his coach’s instructions. Crawford responded by saying Bertuzzi had disobeyed orders from the bench to get off the ice before the attack on Moore. That suit was settled in July 2012.
This, we remind you, was the interaction between the head coach and one of his star players on a team with Stanley Cup aspirations. The relationship between the two men had always been strained. This broke it.
During the 2004-05 owners’ lockout, Bertuzzi indicated he wanted to be traded, but when the Canucks assembled for training camp in 2005-06, he was back playing with Naslund and Morrison.
“It was difficult,” Bertuzzi says. “I talked to (Naslund and Morrison). Could I have stuck it out? I don’t know. There was just so much outside noise. It was just hard to play for a long time.”
Crawford says he met with Bertuzzi privately a couple of times during the year and thought the talks were productive. “But so much had happened,” Crawford says. “There was too much damage. It wasn’t Todd’s fault.”
The Canucks finished ninth in the West that season, missing the final playoff spot by three measly points. The West Coast Express had a decent year — Naslund 32-47-79; Bertuzzi 25-46-71; Morrison 19-37-56 — but the magic was gone. For the Canucks, the larger development that season was the emergence of the Sedins as front-liners.
Crawford was fired immediately at the conclusion of the season. At the draft in Vancouver that summer, Bertuzzi was traded to Florida with Bryan Allen and Alex Auld for Roberto Luongo, Lukas Krajicek and a sixth-round pick. Crawford, who’d been hired by the Kings by then, phoned Nonis on the draft floor and said: “Oh yeah. Now you do it.”
“For that team to grow, we had to move on from everything,” Nonis says.