toby91_ca

In case anyone is interested: Yzerman Lauds Lemieux's Letter

I didn't even know what your question was....I looked for it. I think your original comment was that often suspensions are the result of fighting, which is completely false. Fine, you've clarified what you were talking about. You are talking about goons, enforcers, whatever you want to call them, as being the guys that are responsible for most of the suspensions. Well, if you want to look up who has been suspended so far this year, you'll find the following: - Total suspensions = 30 - By enforcers = 11 - By others = 19 If you want to add cheapshot artist into your list, that will only get a couple more (Cooke and Eager) into the list, so it's still only 13 vs. 16. Slice it however you want, I'm still not sure what point you are trying to make. No team purposely wants players on their team to take suspensions, so suggesting only the rich teams can do it is silly. The teams that have players who are prone to suspension probably haven't come down on them as hard as they might if the team had to cough up $$$ when they get suspended, that's the idea.

I actually disliked Mario more as a player than I do now. Perhaps that's just because you don't hear from him as much anymore. Anyway, I have no issue with Mario's comments or the fact that he employs Cooke. Maybe it took having one, or a few of his players get injured for him to notice, but so what, isn't that natural? You should not though, when Cooke hit Savard, it was legal, but wasn't ignored, a new rule was made......gotta wonder why it only became an issue when Savard got hit though and not when Richards hit Booth (I think it was Booth). Cooke seems to have a changed a bit in that regard though....since the new rule, I don't think Cooke has delivered any head shots. I think he's still an idiot and plays on the edge and gets dirty every now and then, but that shouldn't stop Mario from suggesting teams shoudl be fined to go along with suspensions. For all we know, Cooke gets chewed out all the time by his coach, GM, etc. The problem is, he is an effective player and you live with the fact that he may take it over the edge every now and then. You try to do your best to make sure he doesn't go over the edge, but incidents will occur from time to time.

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make though. Let's take those players as examples: - Cooke - suspended for hitting from behind - Gillies - suspended for head shots, two separate times - Shelley - suspended for hit from behind and for sucker punch - Godard - suspended for leaving the bench to fight - Rypien - suspended for altercation with fan - Kostopoulos - suspended for head shot I think the idea is that you'd try and get the teams to influence their players not to engage in this type of activity. I doubt you'd have many teams have issue with trying to ensure it's players don't: hit from behind, deliver head shots, sucker punch people or fight with fans. It's a tough sport and sometimes things happen so fast it is tough to avoid, but a lot of the times, it's the matter of making a good decision rather than sucker punching someone or purposely take a shot at someone's head, etc.

Exactly. Distance travelled (which many people like to quote number of steps....which really isn't in the rule at all) is one way you can get called for charging. However, I think the most common reason for a charging penalty is when you leave your feet to make the hit. When I look at the video, it looks to me like Brule left his feet before he made contact, which is why I'm okay with the call. Someone may argue that they see it differently and that he didn't leave his feet (even though video doesn't really lie on that), that's fine, then you are arguing he should have rec'd a 2 minute penalty...so what? How is that different than arguing about a bad tripping call? I don't see how this call is because the league is moving away from big body checks in anyway whatsoever.

Really? I would say that fights "rarely" if "ever" lead to suspensions. Quite a bit different than "often." I bet if you did an analysis that took "x" number of fights so far this year and how many of those fights resulted in suspensions, you'd probalby end up somewhere very close to 1-2%, probably lower. I think a suspendable act will often lead to a fight because of what the person did, but that's completely different and actually makes the argument that you want enforcers around to deter suspendable acts.

Ha ha, that's actually probably true. To be fair though, a lot of the guys just send representatives anyway. I like the idea, just wondering how much of an impact it would actually have. Not sure what the comment above relating to only rich teams being able to afford enforcers or afford to play a rough/physical game. You can enforce and play rough, within the rules of the game. If teams actually intend to go out and hurt people and incur suspensions on purpose, then I think the problem is bigger than we all think.

I'm assuming you are joking, but just in case, did you really just quote NHL 11 to try and explain a rule? Gliding vs. striding into a guy has nothing to do with charging or not. Almost all hits happen from a guy "gliding" in as he needs to get his balance set. If you don't glide in, it probably won't work out to well for you.

Why is this such a big deal anyway? I equate this to arguing about any other bad penalty call. Bad calls or missed calls happen every game. Plus, I can see where someone would call it charging anyway. It's not like he got 5 and a game for it.

I watched with no sound, so I'm not sure what the announcers were saying. Assuming they were pretty annoying as usual though. First time I checked, it looked like his right arm and glove was up in the chin area, but it looks okay (pretty close though). Couldn't have been that anyway, if it was, would have been a headshot, more significant penalty. When looking again and focusing on his skates, he does look to jump into the hit a little. His skates only leave the ice by a very small amount, but it looks like he starting jumping into it before he made contact. I'll admit, I'm playing devil's advocate and looking for a reason for the call to be legit. My first instinct was that it was clean. After watching it several times, to be honest, I'd be okay with whatever call they made. Since it was only a 2 minute charging call, there's no big deal here.

Because it is an investment company. They are in the business of making investments and then selling them for more than the initial investment. They need to seel at some point in time to monetize their investment.

http://twitter.com/DarrenDreger

So, I saw this somewhere, not sure where (TSN comments, or whatever). When I first read it, I was thinking someone was joking so I had to look up Ryan Whitney on twitter, sure enough, he said this: So, Whitney is basically saying that playing with Crosby inflated his stats, therefore, landed him a big contract? I've never heard of a player saying something like that....then again, twitter hasn't been around that long and I can't imagine another avenue for such a comment.

Where's the head shot?

Forgive my ignorance, I haven't really seen the guy play. Why do you say he has better hands then McCarty? McCarty's junior stats dwarf Callahan's. As I said, I haven't seen him play, so stats are all I have to go on.

It actually looks like a bit of a charge, but that would only be 2 minutes. In full speed, it also looks like an eblow to the head and the video attached doesn't really show otherwise. I have no problem with the call and if replays show that it was an elbow to the head, then he should be suspended. If the replay shows otherwise, no further action. I've got no problem with that. Wrong calls are made on the time, not sure why people think this means hitting is gone. Also, what are these 10 other examples of guys getting thrown out of the game for clean hits? I know of one of the top of my head and that was Letang earlier in the year. It was an awesome hit, but the other player's helmet flew off and it looked like a head shot at full speed. When you look at the replay, it was shoulder to shoulder...no question, there was actually zero contact with the head. But you can understand why the ref would make the wrong call at full speed.

While I wouldn't make decisions like that, you'd be surprised what others might decide. This is no different from certain sponsors who decided that they no longer want to be associated with Tiger Woods (well, different reasons)

Making this public is probably more important than the actual message itself. Air Canada probably looks at it this way: - there are several people amongst the general population who do not like what is happening in the NHL and they see Air Canada as a major sponsor of the NHL, therefore, these potential Air Canada customers choose they don't want to fly with Air Canada - When Air Canada makes these public comments, it shows the general population that they are not happy either and they are taking steps to try and make change, therefore, the general public should be happy with them....no lost customers.

Thoughts? I'm thinking he gets at least 10 games, but I'd prefer more. He should have gotten a lot more than 9 the last time.

When you fly through the air and deliver an eblow to someone's head, what exactly is your intent? I think actions like that, whether you "intend" to cause a head injury or not is irrelvent. The league is trying to get rid of plays like that for good reason and if you do it, you'll get serious punishment. Also, it was pretty clear that Tangradi was out of it after the eblow and Gillies proceeded to throw punches at him....that was pretty bad too.

I'm speechless.....almost...if you run your mouth, especially to a fighter, watch out because that fighter just might take action, giving you a head injury and potentially impacting your quality of life, for the rest of your life. Oh, and the fighter will be justified of course, because he's simply enforcing. Also, there's a differene between taunting someone across from you on the faceoff or on the bench and taunting someone who is lying on the ice with a head injury, getting help from a trainer. Tangradi has been out for over a month now and as far as I know, is not close to coming back.

Why does the reason matter? From everything I can gather, there was actually no reason at all, other than Gillies being a thug. But what if Tangradi actually "said" something to someone?? Should that warrant what happened? I don't even think Tangradi laid a clean hit on someone to warrant what happened to him. Gillies has no hockey skill whatsoever, he seems to just be on the ice to inflict pain on the opposition. I'm okay with that until you start going over the edge and doing things that injures players.

Are you suggesting that what Gillies did to Tangradi wasn't that bad?

His ability to be completely disgraceful of course.

Good for him, seems like a pretty good guy. Haven't been reading NHL.com, so I'm not sure who's suggesting Jack Adams, that's a bit of a stretch. Yes, they have been hit big time with injuries (their 3 best players will miss at least half the season - Staal the first half and both Crosby and Malkin the second half). But the team isn't exactly playing that great without Crosby and Malkin.