Oh geez…
If it were up to me, yes, it’s suspendable because intent and extent of injury shouldn’t matter, but by those standards McQuaid, Lucic, Marchand, Malone, Wolski, Bogosian, and many more players would have received suspensions for dangerous plays this year.
But Shanahan is a moron, and due to his 'arguments" and “justifications”, precedent set this year should indicate that Erik Cole not receive a suspension because Adam Larsson moved his head into a lower, more vulnerable position immediately before the hit and - if you listen to Shanahan on Malone - Cole could not have been expected in the time and space remaining to avoid the contact. Then again, the same logic applied to Pacioretty, and that got three games.
I expect Shanahan will hand out a suspension because Erik Cole doesn’t play for Boston. :rolleyes:
Here’s the thing that pisses me off: Larsson gets hit and rolls around on the ice looking like he’s dazed and confused, and then eventually gets up and skates to the bench and sits down, rather than immediately going to the locker room for evaluation. Between periods he was, apparently, evaluated and was allowed to return to the game. IF he comes down with a concussion now, the New Jersey Devils are as much to blame as Cole because they did not take appropriate steps to mitigate the potential injury. Larssonsaid he had neck pain…which were Crosby’s first symptoms, remember? I hope for his sake he isn’t concussed, but you’d think he and his team would give a damn about that possibility when he got hit, no?
I have the same beef with the Pittsburgh Penguins who couldn’t have taken more than 3 minutes to “evaluate” Kris Letang before sending him back out into a high-stimulus, high-intensity, highly physically exterting overtime period of hockey. Guess what? The man has a concussion.
There’s no bloody point in suspending Cole or Pacioretty or any of the players who make the hit in the first place if the teams don’t care enough about their players to protect them. It’s reasonable - based on what we know about concussions and how they heal - to assume that that extra ice time worsened Letang’s condition. If Larsson has concussion symptoms, it’s reasonable to assume that the delay in evaluating him and the fact that he played the rest of the game probably worsened those symptoms.
This random-ass retributionary supplementary discipline is a joke. The “quiet room” and evaluation program is a joke…no one even comes close to correctly following that rule. Bitching about suspensions after the fact does nothing to prevent concussions or other injury in the first place. I do want to see strict supplementary discipline, but I want it to be in conjunction with correct treatment for the potentially injured player.
Also, what about this?
The on-ice officials make a call.
If they say it’s just a 2 minute penalty, but Shanahan gives a severe suspension, isn’t that basically an admittance by Shanahan that the referees don’t know what they are doing?
If the on-ice officials give a severe penalty (5 and a game) and Shanny gives no further discipline, I guess you could argue that what the player received was “enough”. Or, Shanahan again disagrees with the on-ice calls, implying that the referees are incompetent.
So which is it? Is Shanny fucking up, or are all the refs fucking up? Are they both incompetent? There’s something wrong here, isn’t there? What’s the league going to do about it?
