Normally controversy in the National Hockey League surrounds an on-ice incident. But in the first week of its 2014-15 season, the NHL is instead facing questions about the very office that tries to control those controversial on-ice incidents, the Department of Player Safety. And it all boils down to this: the DPS has hired Chris Pronger.

There are two problems.

First, he’s Chris Pronger, a man widely hated in his playing days as someone who sometimes took the physical aspect of the game too far. For many, the word “dirty” springs to mind when they think of Chris Pronger. He was the man who, for example, stomped on Ryan Kesler’s leg, the man who elbowed Dean McAmmond, the man who ‘Avery-d’ Miika Kiprusoff. Among other incidents.

So his personal history has raised eyebrows about the way he might judge how others play the game. Isn’t it hypocritical to allow one of the most notorious players of the last two decades to weigh in on the punishment necessary for others’ transgressions?

But even if one isn’t tempted to bring history to bear, there’s a present problem, too: Pronger is still technically on the payroll for the Philadelphia Flyers, even though he hasn’t played since November 2011, when back-to-back head injuries (one from a stick to the eye, the other from a hit to the head), sidelined him. But the Flyers still owe Pronger money. They’ll have to pay him out on the $4.9m contract he signed in 2010 that runs through 2016-17.

Which raises questions about whether Pronger can remain impartial. As a member of the DPS, he won’t be asked for an opinion on any incident involving the Flyers, but he’ll be heard on decisions that affect their divisional rivals. Will his affiliation with the Flyers mean anything? And what about that rule that the league should not pay players while they’re still on team payrolls?

Needless to say, people are talking. Especially when it looks as though the solution to all of this would be to either force Pronger to retire, or simply wait until 2017 before hiring him.

The NHL and others have tried to spin Pronger’s move as a good thing, or simply left the questions totally unaddressed. And Pronger has gone on the record with Yahoo’s Nick Cotsonika, stating his emotions are now not part of the equation. “I’m just looking at a video clip or a TV screen and looking at it going, ‘OK, what happened? What precipitated it? What are the prior offences, if any?’ All the things that everybody goes through. It’s pretty cut-and-dried,” Pronger explained.

Cotsonika was receptive.

“This shouldn’t be about PR,” Cotsonika wrote, referring to the poor appearance of a “dirty player with a conflict of interest” joining “the group charged with cleaning up the game”.

That’s incorrect. Public relations – or, put another way, the way this all looks – should be at the forefront of the NHL’s decision making, particularly because it deals with player safety.

We should give Pronger the benefit of the doubt in his new role. Likely, he’s being sincere when he claims he can maintain objectivity. There’s no serious reason to think he’ll bring any bias to the job. But whether he does or doesn’t have a bias doesn’t really matter. It’s perception that counts.

And the perception is this all stinks.

Despite all it’s done to clean up the game, minimize the role of enforcers, and crack down on the dirty plays and bad hits, the NHL still has a lot of work to do to convince the layperson that it’s no longer a game of goons – all fists and elbows with the occasional goal. And the league still needs to convince its fans, and the public, that it’s serious about both ending concussions, and properly addressing them when they occur.

To its credit, the league has made strides to tackle both cases, and, as Pronger noted, it’s never easy to be the referee – people will always hate you. No matter who stepped into his job, someone would probably take issue.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that it’s not someone else; it’s Chris Pronger. And though he may be a good candidate for his job, the system, which he now represents, must look as clean as possible from the get-go. Always. His tenure as a rule enforcer cannot start with everyone knowing him as a rule-breaker (of article 26 of the collective bargaining agreement, to be precise).

The NHL is desperate to be taken seriously as a premiere North American professional sport. In a lot of ways, it does a good job selling that idea. Hiring Chris Pronger to the DPS right now is not one of them.