“You see every decision I make is arbitrary and based on nothing at all and I’m awful at this.”
The NHL is and always will be an incredibly dangerous league for its participants. Hockey is not exactly a low-contact game to begin with and obviously these guys are flying around and getting better at everything with each passing year. The NHL of today resembles that of the 1980s and ’90s and even early 2000s, for example, in only the most cursory ways: There’s a stick and a puck and skates but the blue lines have moved, there’s a trapezoid behind the net, and the goalies’ pads are smaller and also guys are just about getting killed in every damn game you watch.
How many times in this postseason have we watched a game and said, “Oh, that’s something Brendan Shanahan is going to have to look at?” If it’s not literally every single game so far, it’s pretty damn close, because when the intensity gets ratcheted up to the levels typically observed this time of year, lots of elbows start flying around, lots of knees get taken out, and all that. It’s unavoidable. Or so we’d be led to believe. Read the rest of this entry »
