20 games, actually. I can’t say he didn’t deserve it. It’s hard.to view it as an accident when he followed through on the hit.
Wideman was also diagnosed with a concussion after the game. He wasn’t in his right mind when he hit the official.
The league needs to set the precedent to protect the officials. While I tend to believe the “I was woozy” explanation in this case, it would open the door to a lot of other excuses if it were an effective defense.
If the report that a “spotter” thought he had concussion symptoms but he wanted to stay in the game are correct, that is a problem the league needs to fix immediately.
I think that 20 games is okay and maybe a little light. Way back in 1983 Tom Lysiak got a 20 game suspension for tripping a linesman after a faceoff.
Every time I see the Wideman hit, I see the look on the face of the player on the Preds bench. He is totally shocked by the hit.
Every thug has his first offense but that is so out of character with everything I’ve read about Wideman. In isolation, the act itself seems to deserve a lifetime ban.
So, Ryan Getzlaf scored his first even strength goal of the season last night, in the 49th game for the Ducks.
Ottawa acquires Dion Phaneuf and some trash for a prospect, a 2017 second round pick and some overpaid trash.
I am surprisingly ok with this trade for the Sens. The team has badly needed a second pairing LD for a long time. Yes, he’s overpaid, but to Ottawa his cap hit is less relevant than his salary (which is less than the cap hit), and we save like $12 million on two awful players in Greening and Cowen and one overpaid, injury-prone third liner in Michalek. Take that money out of Phaneuf’s salary and he winds up being pretty reasonably priced. The real key to the deal is that Phaneuf doesn’t have to be the guy anymore. He just has to slot in behind of Karlsson and provide stability for a pretty good young defencemen in Cody Ceci.
Ceci is the biggest winner in all of this. Now that he has a competent partner he can settle down and not be overburdened with trying to prop up a bad partner.
Well I’m OK with the trade too. The Leafs were able to dump a huge salary obligation.
I was extremely dubious about this deal until I saw how much the players traded away made.
Ottawa is a long shot to make the playoffs, but if they’re going to do it, something had to be done about the indisputable fact that they had the worst defense in the NHL. Cowen isn’t as bad a player as people think he is - he is +7 on a way minus team - but Phaneuf can be better.
I sure hope the theory that it will help Ceci is correct; Ceci’s one of the worst players in the NHL according to any rollup metric.