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Good morning, folks.
Hope you all had a lovely weekend. Looks like someone has decided to finally turn on the heat. I’m still, however, looking for the person with the switch to tone down the gale-force winds.
Oh well, if that’s my only problem these days, I’m doing pretty well, right?
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On the subject of turning up the heat and hot air, how about that exchange between Kevin Bieksa and his co-workers — Jennifer Botterill, Kelly Hrudey and Ron MacLean — during the first intermission of Hockey Night in Canada‘s Saturday night telecast of the Sens-Jets game.
In case you missed it, Bieksa was on one side of assessing last week’s Rangers-Caps/Tom Wilson three-ring circus while the others were expressing a different — let’s call it enlightened — viewpoint.
Bieksa put it best himself when he said: “It looks like I’m on my own here.”
Um, yep.
I’m going to try to be tactful. Ok, maybe not.
Bieksa’s take on Tom Wilson’s antics last week was ridiculous and is unfortunately representative of the backwards-thinking that keeps hockey in the dark ages.
The former NHL defenceman has mostly been well-spoken and offered plenty of interesting insight since joining the HNIC crew, but Saturday night he embarrassed himself with his Don Cherry-like logic.
Kevin Bieksa
If you didn’t catch the brouhaha last week, Wilson punched Pavel Buchnevich in the head a couple of times after the whistle while the Rangers forward lay prone on the ice with no way to defend himself. In the enusing mayhem he rag-dolled Artemi Panarin, dangerously tossing the helmetless Rangers superstar head-first to the ice.
Wilson later referred to the melee as a “fairly routine hockey scrum.”
Bieksa agreed, calling the punches to the head of a defenceless player “noogies” and flippantly suggested he’d been in worse pillow fights.
Therein lies the problem. If the perception by a so-called hockey expert is that this is no big deal, no wonder senseless acts of violence continue to occur in hockey. Just part of the game, right?
What shocked me most about Bieksa’s comments was he blamed the Rangers, suggesting they need a change in player culture that would prevent players like Wilson from taking liberties with their star players.
Is having an enforcer on your team even a thing these days?
I guess I shouldnt be surprised by this rubbish. After all, it’s coming from a guy who is known for his Superman punch — a cheap-shot approach he had to hockey fighting, in which he would leave his feet and lunge at his opponent, hoping to deliver a shot to the chin.
Kevin Bieksa needs to go back to the cave he surfaced from. And take the rest of his Neanderthal-thinking cohorts with him.
Listen, growing up I was a huge fan of the Big Bad Bruins and at the time I loved every punch thrown by the likes of Wayne Cashman and Terry O’Reilly.
Now, I cringe when I see players square off to fight. I would be just fine if I never witnessed another hockey fight.
Recently, I was watching a game with someone who has not watched a lot of pro sports/hockey when two players dropped their gloves to square off in a fight. “They just let them do that?” she asked.
Yep, they do that. Still.
I was wrong to once admire O’Reilly and Bobby Nystrom of the Islanders pummel each other. I had no idea at the time how dangerous it was.
Now we do.
And kudos to Botterill, who spoke to exactly that issue — player safety.
As a result of Wilson’s recklessness, Panarin suffered a lower-body injury which has sidelined him for the remainder of the season.
According to Bieksa, that’s his own fault: just because he’s a skilled played, it doesn’t allow him to jump on Wilson without posisble facing the consequences.
Panarin was forced into trying to deal with an out-of-control Wilson in an effort to assist his teammates.
Good for him, for trying. But he shouldn’t have to.
And not because the Rangers should have a goon to look after it — but because the NHL should do something to curtail situations that require skilled players to deal with the lunatic fringe.
If the NHL handed out unsportmanlike penalties for all these bush-league scrums and noogies, they’d stop pretty quickly.
But they aren’t serious about changing, now, are they?
And with the likes of Bieksa around, it’s hard to say when and if they will change.
Wilson, by the way, left a Saturday night game against the Philadelphia Flyers with an apparent knee injury after a leg-on-leg collision with forward Nicolas Aube-Kubel in the neutral zone.
He later returned and finished the game, but reportedly did not look totally himself.
There was a time when I would have suggested he got what he deserved — you live by the sword and die by the sword.
I hope he’s OK.
As always folks, you can reach me by replying to this mailing or by sending me an email here.
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