The Goal Savard Scored after Gregory Campbell Got Called for High-Sticking on Feb. 24, 2007

The video of the infraction in question is unfortunately hidden away in the infinite annals of the internet, but here is the goal Boston Bruin Marc Savard scored to apparently add insult to injury to a high-sticking call made against then-Florida Panther Gregory Campbell on February 24, 2007. If you pay attention to the background noise, you can hear the penalty being announced. While it's not much, it does serve as proof (along with actual game reports still easily accessible on the NHL's website) that NHL disciplinarian Colin Campbell's son got a high-sticking penalty during the game in question, which has led to quite the internet buzz on Monday calling for his resignation or outright dismissal.

While it's still sinking in that Campbell could be so petty as to hold a grudge against a player he once coached 13 years ago with the New York Rangers (Savard), all the alleged evidence seems to be pointing that way. Add in the fact that Pittsburgh Penguin Matt Cooke got away suspensionless last March for his hit on that same player, and it doesn't look any better, especially seeing as the league could have handed out additional discipline for intent to injure if they deemed it necessary.

Regarding supplementary discipline, according to league rules (rule 28.1), the NHL may "investigate any incident that occurs... and may assess additional fines and/or suspensions for any offense committed during the course of a game... whether or not such offense has been penalized by the Referee."

The Match penalty Cooke should have gotten for "deliberately [attempting] to injure... an opponent in any manner" (rule 21.1) kind of makes the case against Campbell that much worse. At the time of the incident, the lack of a suspension was chalked up to incompetence on the part of the league, but in light of the discovery by blogger Tyler Dellow from mc79hockey (the site may be too overloaded right now) it has to be said that maybe foul play was afoot. Take a look at the video from last season during which Campbell explains his motivation for not handing down a ban of any length to Cooke and his bald-headed, gremlin-like exterior looks that much more villainous.

What's sad about this whole mess is that the league finds itself in a position where it must hope that people look back to the end of last season and pray the general consensus is that Campbell was just inept in failing to hand out a suspension to Savard, because the alternative is soooo much worse for everyone involved.

Campbell should not be fired for this incident, because there really is not enough evidence in the supposed emails he sent Stephen Walkom (who, interestingly enough, was behind the huge Colton Orr non-call last month against the Toronto Maple Leafs) to crucify him. He can successfully deny that his feelings towards his son and towards Savard did not come into play when he was making his decision on the Cooke hit eight months ago, because there are no emails chronicling his thought process then.

However, truth be told, Campbell likely should have been fired countless times beforehand for the clear double standards and inconsistent rulings he has allowed to live on during his tenure as a league executive. As much as I hate to admit it, Campbell may very well be bulletproof, and all the Bruins can do right now is be thankful his son plays on their team.

With Goaltending like This, Who Needs Goalies?

Memo to all NHL teams: cut-out goalies can be purchased at your local sporting-goods stores at the very reasonable price of approximately 1/100,000 of what you're paying your actual ones. That, and they don't talk back as much when they feel like they're not starting enough.

On Sunday, quite a few general managers might have felt like making such an investment, with a total of 30 goals scored in just four games, which translates into 3.75 allowed per team. Admittedly, New York Ranger Marian Gaborik and Edmonton Oiler Nikolai Khabibulin did their part in inflating those statistics, with the former actually doing his job after pulling a Houdini of late, and the latter showing his age... apparently the same as the actual Berlin Wall, complete with the all the cracks you would come to expect from something that's 49 years old... and got torn down two decades ago.

Still, as far as I can tell, of the eight Khabibulin allowed, none were as bad as the one above by the Minnesota Wild's Cal Clutterbuck on the Tampa Bay Lightning's Dan Ellis, or Washington Capital Alexander Ovechkin's on Atlanta Thrasher Chris Mason, who actually put it in his own net (below).

So, the Wild's Niklas Backstrom gets credit for providing the only real credible performance of the night, with just one goal allowed (37 saves) against the Bolts. But Chuck Fletcher had probably take note of the memo above for playoff time (if the Wild get that far). Jose Theodore is your back-up after all.

The Legend of Sean Avery Continues to Grow

New York Ranger Sean Avery is becoming a little more every day like that monster under children's beds, a story kids grow up believing that scares them straight, a myth that grows and grows in their minds unless nipped in the bud at a very young age. That is in fact how some kids never seem to get over being afraid of the dark, or Vogue magazine interns with little actual fashion sense.

In any case, the latest addition to that legend came on Sunday and it goes a little something like this: "Whenever you lay your head down at night to close your eyes and go to sleep,  as sure as the night sky is black, he will attack from under your bed and feast on your soul, then his to keep."

Edmonton Oiler Ladislav Smid now knows firsthand just how real the stories are, that the troll in question has little to no actual honour after he reportedly laid him out with a cheapshot in Sunday's 8-2 Rangers' win in New York. The real ironic part is that the initial hit that set Smid off, got him looking for a fight, was actually a relatively clean one on Colin Fraser, meaning Avery shouldn't have had to fight and no one would have thought any less of him afterwards (at least in theory, anyway; everyone probably assumed the amount of  respect for him was already as low as possible). However, with the incident going down as it did, with Avery clocking Smid as he looked away, allegedly after telling him numerous times to "wait", Avery has sunk even lower. How low, you may ask. Let's just say his being brain-dead must not be a coincidence and be a direct result of drowning in depths of water not yet explored by humans.

It's not as if Smid is a super-heavyweight either. He is 6'3" and (just barely) over 200 pounds, but he has also just been in a handful of fights. Avery has been in over 50, so he most definitely had the edge experience-wise. Of course, after yesterday, maybe someone should review the tapes and see just how many he actually fought cleanly.

Fifty-Goal Seasons never Strike Lightning Players Twice unless Their Name Is Stamkos

So, Tampa Bay Lightning captain Vincent Lecavalier is now out, which would kind of matter if the book on him hasn’t been for the past two years.

I believe it’s entitled Great Unfulfilled Expectations, an unheralded instant classic that chronicles the main character’s constant run-ins with two primary antagonists: the villainous injury bug, which time and again has slowed and killed any forward momentum mustered in his career, as well as his own past success, which continues to haunt him just as his overbearing 11-year, $85-million contract does management and the team’s fan base.

Brilliant stuff, really, subject to rave reviews. Granted those rave reviews have been written by division rivals and lower-tier players grateful for the inflationary side-effects his nonsense deal has had on their salaries, but any feedback must be good feedback when you’re talking about a player becoming increasingly irrelevant in the landscape of the game today, who’s now been reduced to playing second fiddle to fellow-center and fellow-former-number-one-draft-pick Steven Stamkos, who at the tender age of 19 was able to do what it took Lecavalier eight seasons to accomplish, and that is to score 50 goals in one season.

Admittedly, not too many players get the chance to count themselves among the true elite of the sport who have reached that milestone, and Lecavalier does deserve props for that one season back in 2006-2007, but his point and goal totals have dropped significantly since then, from 108 (52), to 92 (40), to 67 (29), followed by a slight uptick to 70 (24) last season.

I get that Lecavalier is currently the team’s captain and he brings certain “intangibles” to the table, but more and more those intangibles look like him handicapping his team financially for the next decade, thereby preventing them from ever repeating as Stanley Cup champions, which, by the way, they won without him as captain. He had been stripped of it for being too immature.

Of course, it’s hard to make the argument that the Lightning would be more competitive without Lecavalier on the roster, because they still have over $11 million in cap space with him, but as a small-market team the Lightning can ill-afford to throw money away to the first person that comes along, especially with the next person, Stamkos, due for a big raise when he becomes a restricted free agent this summer.

"I think I just tweaked something stretching... damn. Coach said NOT to over-exert myself."

So, with Lecavalier now out of the line-up after breaking his hand on the most innocuous of plays against the Washington Capitals, it now perhaps opens the door for more ice time to be given to some of the more deserving players on the Lightning’s roster, at least for the next three-to-four weeks, at which point he is set to return and brainwash the coaching staff into thinking he is actually more valuable than say Dominic Moore, another centre on the team that represents one-seventh of Lecavalier’s salary-cap hit.

Moore, who has played four less games due to a groin injury, has just two fewer points. Not only that, but he gets less ice time than Lecavalier. So much so that, when adding up his ice time into 60-minute shifts, he averages 3.60 points per full game. Lecavalier averages 2.07. Even one of the team’s reserve centres in Blair Jones, with just two points, averages 3.56 points per full game, having played just 33:42 this year.

Obviously, putting Jones ahead of Lecavalier on the team’s depth chart is ludicrious, but it is food for thought along with the fact that the league’s leading scorer in Stamkos averages 5.41 points, meaning Vinny has quite a ways to go to catch up to his young understudy, who stopped following in his shoes about the time Barry Melrose stopped coaching the Lightning. Funny how that worked out, isn’t it?

Inevitably, the comparisons between the two have to stop, because it’s like comparing apples and oranges... a zesty orange filled to the brim with vitamin C to keep you healthy, and a rotten apple rife with worms and brown spots after taking one too many tumbles over the years.

Lecavalier isn’t really guilty of much. As of the end of the last season, he has the most points of anyone taken in the 1998 draft, so he came very much as advertised as the best player available that year. Of course, when the team’s owner at the time, Art Williams, declared he would be the Michael Jordan of hockey it raised expectations up to a certain point. For God’s sakes, Lecavalier hasn’t even been the Scottie Pippen of hockey, but the same last name sure does fit.

New Video! GetReal #5

"Puck the Bunnies"... as Opposed to, what?

Here's a little viral video based on the dying breed of hockey "fans" known as puck bunnies care of ukeleleist(?) Tally Deushane. There's some racy lyrics, but nothing regular readers of this blog can't handle, so feel free to press play.

"I'd hate Avery with every ounce of my being, but I'm just sooo happy."

For the blissfully unaware, puck bunnies are hockey groupies, the girls that hang around hockey arenas looking to "meet" hockey players, and it doesn't even need to be an NHL arena. You can go to any major junior hockey game, any university one, any ECHL one for crying out loud, and, as sure as Evgeni Malkin is slumping it up with the Pittsburgh Penguins this year, you will find a handful that think the goalie is pretty cute, or at least he looked cute that second he took his mask off and had the water bottle up against his face. It's a foregone conclusion that even Malkin, the Frankenstein's monster that he is, has met his fair share. Case and point would be Toronto Maple Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf being romantically linked to Elisha Cuthbert. She looks like her, and he like some bulldozer had a field day on his forehead.

Cuthbert is perhaps the most well-known of her species, but she is the rarest as well, since most puck bunnies reputedly stalk their prey out of the desire to upgrade their social stature. And she of course made it to Hollywood all on her own. But make no mistake... she is a puck bunny proven by her once being blinded by the lustre of the crest off Sean Avery's jersey as well, until she came to her senses and realized he was a misogynist with clear-cut mother issues, because even they have standards. They're not high, but they are at least existent.

Semin Shows Ovechkin how It's Done

I don't think anyone will ever confuse Washington Capitals stars Alexander Semin and Alexander Ovechkin. Despite the fact that both share the same first name, despite each being Russian, and despite each not exactly meeting any one conventional standard of attractiveness. Just taking that last point as an example, one looks like he fell face-first out of his mother's womb 25 years ago and the other fights about as effeminately as  his appearance is androgynous. However, they both can score, seemingly at will, and even taking into account their aforementioned physical shortcomings it is probably safe to assume that they do so about as prolifically off the ice as they do on it. But I digress.

On Thursday, Semin scored a hat trick, providing the margin of victory in his team's 6-3 win over the Tampa Bay Lightning. Ovechkin also scored in the game and added two assists, leading to speculation that his spot on the roster is safe for now.

What's perhaps most impressive about Semin's trick is that he scored all three goals in just 15:11, all in the third period. Indeed, Semin continues to disprove my argument that he wouldn't know what the term clutch meant if he was locked in a washroom with diarrhea with nothing to read but the manual to his sports car. Power to him... for making me look foolish and having enough money to own a sports car.

However, as impressive as Semin's accomplishment last night was, the owner of the NHL record for the fastest record is way faster, clocking in at 21 seconds. That record belongs to Chicago Blackhawks great Bill Mosienko, who scored his trick against the New York Rangers on March 23, 1952.

Kinda makes you long for the good old days when hockey fights were fought between tough guys and pansies knew not to, doesn't it?