by Will-He-M
I fully agree with Guru here. The NHL front office is seemingly trying to curb the raw emotion that makes Playoff hockey such an amazing and awe inspiring event.
If you look back to the 80's, when fighting was truly part of the game, back when a smart man ran the league (John Ziegler). Their was so much rivalry and so much emotion that it was damn near impossible not to see 2-3 fights per game.
For instance, we have seen just a single raw emotion series since 1992 that everybody remembers, and that was the Wings-Avs series when Claude Lemieux cheap shotted Kris Draper. Outside of that, we see nothing that even compares and as long as the NHL tries to ween out fighting and as long as that penguin Gary Bettman is still in office, we'll never see hockey go back to it's roots.
As for now, we are blatantly seeing a double standard when it comes to how to discipline players. Dan Carcillo punches Maxime Talbot right off a face off, gets no penalty and gets a 1 game suspension. The very next night, we see an exact duplication of the Carcillo-Talbot incident. In the Calgary-Chicago series, Mike Cammalleri and Martin Havlat were jabbing and talking trash to one another all game. Then, off a face off in I believe the 3rd period, Cammalleri punches Havlat in the jaw, not the helmet like Carcillo had done to Talbot.
Now, the major difference in these situations is that the puck never went towards Havlat, in fact, off the face off, the puck went to the opposite direction. Cammalleri got 2 minutes for roughing and by what we seen the previous night, he should have gotten a 1 game suspension.
But, Colin Campbell stated that the "incidents were not close to being the same as they happened at different points in the respective games". Ok, that really doesn't make sense to me. By that type of standard, if Sean Avery crushed Alex Semin from behind with 5 minutes left in the 3rd period of Game 2 today, he'd get 5, 10, a game and a suspension but if Dion Phaneuf did the exact same thing tonight but in say the 2nd period, he'd get 2 for boarding and nothing else?
The NHL really needs to re-think who they have running this league as I firmly believe Colin Campbell and Gary Bettman are trying to ruin this league by taking the physicality out of the equation so we're left with pretty much basketball on ice.
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