"I lost my entire career in my rookie year.” – Steve Moore, March 2014

“It has been incredibly difficult and stressful for him.” – Lawyer Geoff Adair, on his client Todd Bertuzzi, August 2014

Steve Moore reached a settlement on Tuesday with the man who ended his career, Todd Bertuzzi, and the team that allegedly gave marching orders to harm him, the Vancouver Canucks.

It’s over, after 10 years of accusations.

Ten years of lawsuits. Ten years of pain, strain and a looming public relations nightmare for Gary Bettman.

"We are pleased that the resolution of this matter allows the parties to turn the page and look to the future," said NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly to the Canadian Press.

Moore was seeking $38 million from the defendants in this civil suit, before upping the ante to $68 million in July. The damages were for loss of future earnings, as well as the anguish Moore went through after his career ended on March 8, 2004.

That’s the night when Bertuzzi sucker-punched Moore, then a forward for the Colorado Avalanche, driving his head into the ice, where it rested in a pool of his blood until he was stretchered off the ice.

The attack was vengeance for Moore’s elbow that concussed Canucks captain Markus Naslund earlier in the season. Actually, it was vengeance on top of vengeance, as Moore had already “answered the bell” and fought Matt Cooke of the Canucks in the first period.

But late in the third, Bertuzzi took his shot at Moore, fulfilling an obligation for revenge established by his teammates and allegedly endorsed by his coach, Marc Crawford.

Bertuzzi was charged with assault causing bodily harm, pleading guilty and getting a conditional discharge from a B.C. court. He was suspended the rest of the season; overall, the lockout-extended ban lasted 17 months and 20 games.

Here’s his tearful statement in the aftermath of the incident:

The terms of the settlement are under lock and key. We may never know what this cost Bertuzzi and the Vancouver Canucks. Just as we may never know what Moore lost in this incident, because his career was just blossoming.

But we know what the NHL lost on March 8, 2004, and continued to lose for the next 10 years: Its archaic notions of justice, its invulnerability from the pressures of outside forces to change with the times and, above all else, the sanctity of its “Code.”

***

There were two landmark moments in player safety in the last decade for the NHL.

One was Sidney Crosby’s concussion and subsequent absence from the League, which was the tipping point for a crusade already propelled by the gravity of head injuries to David Booth and Marc Savard. It led to new rules on head shots, the development of the Dept. of Player Safety and created genuine concern, perhaps for the first time under Bettman, that the league’s star assets needed better protection from their employer in the form of punishment to their assailants.

But the genesis of that crusade was Bertuzzi/Moore. It was the moment when the hockey world took a step back and reevaluated conventional notions of enforcement, vigilante justice and “The Code.”

It had to, because the mainstream took notice and started asking questions about what exactly in the hell was going on in hockey, where an incident like this could occur and be considered, by some, to be part of the game.

That’s pretty much what Katie Couric asked when the clip made “The Today Show” the following morning. (And really, the NHL on the “Today Show” in anything but a cheesecake segment promoting the Winter Classic is bad news.

As she said: “We've talked a few times before about how unneccessarily violent the sport of hockey can be …”

Ouch.

Hearing hockey people rationalize the incident, then and in hindsight, makes one squirm.

Take Stu Grimson, an intelligent student of the game and obvious proprietor of the rough stuff, and his comments to the LA Times 10 years ago:

"When it's portrayed on CNN or by Katie Couric it looks like some ugly beast that's crawled out from under the stairs and you say, 'This doesn't belong in society.’ I don't condone what Todd Bertuzzi did, but you have to appreciate the context that kind of act comes from. If you don't know the sport and you throw the 15-second clip on CNN all day, it sounds simplistic to say it's presented out of context. But that's really what happens."

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