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jollymania

Cooke hits Savard

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From Boston Globe:

Bruins center Marc Savard is going to be more cautious this time.

Savard played for Boston in the postseason after suffering a concussion in March, but acknowledged Saturday he was still feeling the effects of the injury during the Bruins' loss to the Philadelphia Flyers in the Eastern Conference semifinals.

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"I think, of my own fault, I might've come back a little too early here, so that's my own fault.

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I don't remember reading that Savard had training in self diagnosis; somebody is lying. Now, his statements seem to take the Bruins off the hook. The team's medical staff, and the other professionals who handled this case, should have stepped in and told him "no".

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I think it's a priority, but how they go about writing new rules concerning hits to the head can soon become a slippery slope.

There was 1 example how a back-checking player cannot check the puck carrier (thus reducing the blind-sided hits)...Dunno if I like something like that.

I'm in favor of throwing the book at the offender; so for example - Matt Cooke had ample time to either not hit Marc Savard, or to concentrate contact with Savard's body, but instead we all had seen Cooke go for Savard's head...IMHO this could/should warrant a 15-20 game suspension - especially since Cooke has a habit of such hits.

EDIT - also the elimination of the instigator rule would be nice; watching somone like Lucic/Thorton/Chara smack that jerk Cooke around would be nice too.

Ok, explain this one to me. I understand the idea of "immediate payback" by having an enforcer. I've been a hockey fan for a long time, I grew up watching Probert and Kocur. But explain to me how eliminating the instigator rule gets rid of injuries.

Better yet, explain it to Cam Neely. Explain it to Pat LaFontaine. Explain to them about how enforcers protect star players from cheap shots. I bet they'd like to hear it as much as I would.

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It's very easy to point out when, and where players were injured, and yet the enforcer didn't prevent it from happening thus giving ammo to the anti-enforcer crowd...It's hockey afterall, and yes nobody here including myself has ever claimed that enforcers will deter cheapshots by 100%...A more interesting question would be exactly how many attempts, or thoughts of going after guys like Yzerman, or Fedorov were deterred/thwarted because guys like Probert, Kocur, McCarty, Shanahan, etc, etc were out there?

As for the instigator rule - the vast majority who have to fear it's removal are those who have a penchant for taking liberties on their unsuspecting opponents...I watched an interesting interview of Shanahan talking about the instigator rule; he didn't have a problem with it...In fact he said that if he wanted to go after someone - he'd risk the extra 2 min pen, and rely on the teams strong pk to take care of business.

If anything - the teams tuff guy will make the opposition think twice about going after anyone - unless of course they don't mind having to answer for their actions...Not to sound redundant, but if tuff guys weren't needed - why do they exist on many teams rosters?

My point was not that tough guys weren't needed; it was that if a guy like Cooke is going to throw a dirty hit, he's not going to say"Oh no, they have an enforcer on their roster. I'd better not." It's going to happen.

The secondary question I had was, of course, this one. You want to eliminate the instigator to allow enforcers to extract payback for dirty hits. What happens when it's a legal hit thrown by one team's star player at another team's star player, and the second player's enforcer extracts payback by going after the first guy, injures him, and puts him out for a week?

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To be honest, once a player takes a cheap shot I don't even give a s*** about the "code". I'm absolutely fine with a player like Downey or whoever pummeling the s*** out of whoever takes a run at one of our players. I don't care if it's Orpik or Briere or Malkin. You step into the ring, you get your ass beat, end of story. That's an enforcer, not, you hit Zetterberg so I'm gonna fight your enforcer bulls***. Whoever commits the crime gets his ass beat hard, end of f***in' story.

esteef

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