Milbury said it straight out: Patrick Kane was ineffectual as center.  Kane’s face-off win percentage was probably 33% on average, and he got hammered and nailed upon most attempts to take the puck to the net.

Milbury concluded that Kane lacked depth as center, and observed that Kane was being yelled at by the coach on the bench for lack of production (not to mention the turnovers and/or giveaways).  So I have to ask: Will Patrick Kane’s tenure in Chicago soon be coming to an end?  Will the Chicago Blackhawks be floating him for a trade?  Just think what the Hawks could do with $5 million in extra cap space…hmmm….

He went on to explain to the Sun-Times that Sarah Kustok had “comprehensive sports knowledge.”  How drunk was this guy???  I have no problem with women reporting on sports.  As a woman myself, I think it’s well past time.  But that’s why Kustok annoys me.  She appears to know very little about sports, and if you’re going to be a chick doing a job in a male-dominated field, you better be more than a pretty face; you better know your stuff.

If Comcast really cared about having someone who knows their stuff ask questions, they’d send Gail Fischer down there.  Now that lady knows sports!

Apparently, what is clearly a hip check will in the future be ruled as “clipping” (which is when a player takes an opponent out by the knees, not the hip) and will in addition be assessed as a game misconduct. Lame!

Tonight the Blackhawks beat the Columbus Blue Jackets 5 to 2 and Viktor Stalberg scored his first NHL hat trick, but perhaps more memorable is that the Hawks were called for ‘instigating’ twice.  So it looks like the Blackhawks will be the team that the NHL proves their instigating penalty on. 

And what is instigating exactly?  According to the NHL’s ever-changing rule book,

“A player who is deemed to be both the instigator and aggressor of an altercation shall be assessed an instigating minor penalty, a major penalty for fighting, a ten-minute misconduct (instigator) and a game misconduct penalty (aggressor).”

Does nobody think this is too severe? After all, Canucks’ Alex Burrows cheap shotted Bruins’ Shawn Thornton in the Canucks/Bruins game the other night, but nobody called constant bur-on-the-butt Burrows for instigating.

It also looks like the NHL is confusing an “aggressor” with an “instigator” as if they were one and the same.  According to the NHL an “aggressor” is,

“…the player who continues to throw punches in an attempt to inflict punishment on his opponent who is in a defenseless position or who is an unwilling combatant.”

Um, yeah, but what do you call an Alex Burrows-type who repeatedly takes cheap shots on guys (hair pulling, biting, scratching, spearing, high-sticking) in order to entice them into fighting?  See, because the dictionary defines instigating as “urging, provoking, or inciting some action or course” and in the case of Alex Burrows in that game the other night, it was he who instigated first.  To put that in playground rules, Alex Burrows started it first!

But the NHL give themselves an out for bad refereeing:

“Referees are provided very wide latitude in the penalties with which they may impose under this rule. This is done intentionally to enable them to differentiate between the obvious degrees of responsibility of the participants either for starting the fighting or persisting in continuing the fighting. The discretion provided should be exercised realistically.”

Another way to define “wide latitude” is “subjectivity” ensuring that no two games are called exactly alike, or properly.  Why subjectivity?  Because refs have preferences for certain teams and dislikes for others, and because the NHL rules are so vague as to be interpreted in many different ways.  For instance, if the instigating rule were a law it wouldn’t hold water; it would be voided for vagueness.  So why should the NHL purposely leave the instigating rule vague so as to ensure confusion and bad calls, i.e. improperly refereed games?

And I guess I can understand why they created the penalty for being the 3rd man to engage in a fight (the old “3rd man in rule”) to guarantee that NHL fights didn’t turn into bench-clearers, but coming to the aid of a teammate after he got checked dirty — like Steve Montador and Jamal Mayers in tonight’s game who were defending Andrew Brunette and Niklas Hjalmarsson respectively — shouldn’t be instigating or a game misconduct.  These kinds of rules are ruining the integrity of hockey and need to stop!

My gosh, did you see Niklas Hjalmarsson get pounded on the ice tonight?  He was on the business end of a dirty check to the head from Blue Jackets’ Jared Boll and a nasty high-stick to the eye from Tomas Kubalik.  Granted the high-stick was an accident, but the dirty hit certainly wasn’t and deserved an answer from Jamal Mayers.  So I disagree with the whole “instigating” penalty as it’s defined by the NHL and as it’s being enforced by the refs.  I understand the fine line the NHL walks between trying to keep the players safe and over-enforcement, but all these rules are ruining hockey.  Seriously, I’m with Don Cherry on this one: If you overly penalize fighting, you will ruin the character of the game and therefore the game itself.

That said, congratulations to Viktor Stalberg on his hat trick and to Dave Bolland on his shorty goal;  Tazer (who took a puck to the head off a deflected shot from Duncan Keith in the 1st period) and Jelly go ice your heads; and hey NHL, can we cool it on the instigation penalties for one hot minute???

Typical.  Where there’s a goon, there’s a Vancouver Canuck, and it’s usually Alex Burrows and Kevin Bieksa.  Good for Boston, particularly Zdeno Chara and Milan Lucic.  Forget about the misconducts.  A yard sale is the only language the Canucks seem to understand.

Hey refs, how about an instigating penalty on constant troublemaker Alex Burrows???  And hey NHL, how about a suspension on Burrows for a history of instigating and goonery?  Milan Lucic wouldn’t have left the bench had Alex Burrows not cheap-shotted Shawn Thornton in the face.  Hey, remember when Alex Burrows bit Bruins’ Patrice Bergeron in game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals last year?  Cause it looks like the refs forgot!

And as a little jog down memory lane for Blackhawks fans, remember when Alex Burrows pulled Duncan Keith’s hair like a little girl?  Remember when Ben Eager jerseyed Kevin Bieksa?  Good times.

More:

Alex Burrows’ Number Called by Refs

Speaking of getting it right, the Hawks couldn’t in tonight’s shutout by the Avs. I don’t think we have ever seen Captain Serious, Jonathan Toews, so frustrated. In the dwindling moments of the game, Toews was slow to get up after having been knocked once again to the ice, and he just never seemed to recover his will. When the game was over, Toews uncharacteristically was one of the first off the ice to the dressing room, foregoing his usual fist bump to each of his teammates. I can only imagine what he had to say to his teammates once off the ice. Hopefully he angrily yelled at them and said something like, “I can’t carry an entire team by myself. So if you don’t have the heart to get out there and do your best and stop bumbling around with the puck, then what are you doing here???” Toews had every right to take a breeze on his team after the game was over; they took a breeze on him while the game was still on.

Take Carlos Zambrano.  Now I am not at all saying that Zambrano juices, but when compared to the temper tantrums or the ill-temperedness of other athletes who do juice (ahem, Barry Bonds) was Z’s temper really that big a deal? (If you ask this fan, Carlos Marmol, Derrek Lee, and the Gatorade machine were all asking for it!)  In fact, didn’t former White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen, another fiery Venezuelan, attribute Z’s zeal to his Latino heritage?  The Cubs were all on-board with Z’s Latino “passion” once too.  Funny how the Cubs are all about multiculturalism until they need to dump a contract.  Then a player’s Latino “passion” becomes “temper tantrums” and what local AM station 670 ‘The Score’ attributed to Zambrano being a “lunatic” and an “ass.” In fact, Z’s “passion” didn’t really start becoming an issue until Z’s play began to drop off.  Then, the Cubs appear to have used Z’s frustrations on the mound as an excuse to liquidate him.  If in fact that’s what happened, it not only signals a new, shadier culture in the Cubs’ ownership/management, but it’s just utterly contemptible as is getting Chicago’s TV and radio stations to join in on the slander wagon.  I believe I’ll be skipping this baseball season and perhaps many more after that if this is how the Cubs’ organization is now going to conduct itself.

As I mentioned in a prior post, I actually witnessed in person Zambrano’s no-hitter against the Houston Astros in Milwaukee on September 14, 2008. I don’t know how anyone who witnessed the magic of that game could be happy to see Zambrano leave Chicago.  Zambrano has given Chicago the best years of his career and this is how you repay him?

Despite how shabbily the Cubs organization and the media have treated Zambrano, I would just like to say to Z thanks for the memories, thanks for that awesome no-hitter, and best of luck in Florida!  Certainly you’ll be happier under the protective watchful eyes of Ozzie Guillen than you were under the suspicious eyes of the Cubs’ organization and their lap-dog media.

That said, I was rather surprised that Coach Quenneville defended Carcillo’s hit saying,

“It’s a quick moment when you’re going for a counter hit fighting for a puck…He (Carcillo) probably had better leverage than the other guy. His intent certainly wasn’t what happened.”

There’s that word again: intent.  I’m not so sure there wasn’t intent there.  Certainly Carcillo didn’t mean to hurt Gilbert, but he did intend to slam him into the end boards that hard.

And how do you defend a forceful hit like that when the guy doesn’t even have the puck? In fact, remember James Wisniewski’s hit on Brent Seabrook in 2010?  After that despicably dirty hit, which earned Wiz an eight game suspension without pay, Quenneville said:

“You hit a guy without the puck, you could kill a guy…It’s the most dangerous hit in the history of the game…He tried to hurt him…If that’s not intent, that’s as bad a hit as you could ever have in the game.”

Ok, so how can Q decry Wisniewski’s dirty hit on Brent Seabrook, who didn’t have the puck, and not Daniel Carcillo’s dirty hit on Tom Gilbert, who also didn’t have the puck?  In both cases extreme force was used against the boards.  How do you justify that?

It’s one thing if you’re going full-bore trying to beat a guy for the puck, run out of ice, and meet the end boards; but it’s another thing entirely to see the end boards, high-stick a guy in the face, and plow him into the end boards because you know it will shut him down.   That’s what Carcillo did and it’s what NHL disciplinarian Brendan Shanahan called “using the boards as a weapon.”  I agree.  So, does Q really want to make the argument that Dan Carcillo just doesn’t know his own strength?  Q’s own prior statement about dirty hits on guys who don’t have the puck is a direct contradiction to his current argument about Carcillo’s hit not being dirty.

That brings to mind the other problem that I consistently see with these suspensions.  It’s nice that a team will send a coach to back their player at a press conference or in interviews, but perhaps the teams’ managers, coaches, and even owners should start taking responsibility for how their players play.  Again, I have to come back to the Vancouver Canucks and the 2004 Todd Bertuzzi incident.  Certainly Bertuzzi didn’t mean to so severely injure the Avalanche’s Steve Moore that it ended his career, but that’s what happened.  Now how much responsibility should the Canucks’ owner, management, and coaches have borne for that goony type of play?  According to the NHL, $250,000.  That’s it.  Meanwhile, Todd Bertuzzi was forced to walk the plank and face the sharks virtually alone.  But everyone knows that the goony type of play that the Canucks engage in does not come solely from the players themselves.  So, to make Bertuzzi take almost the whole of the punishment — bad press, civil lawsuits, a criminal investigation, and a resulting sentence — sold Bertuzzi up the river. (It was like how after the congressional investigation Major League Baseball and the teams themselves took no responsibility for the steroid problem in baseball, as if the pressure to juice had all come from the players themselves.)  And what did the Canucks get?  A slap on the wrist and a fine.  Is that fair???

Perhaps the NHL should start looking a little further up the food chain when assessing blame for dirty hits and overall goonery.  Rough, aggressive play and fighting are part of the game.  But goonery is bad sportsmanship and is proving season after season to be more and more dangerous.