Off Wing Opinion

Though it's ridiculously late and I really should be in bed, there are a couple of thoughts I'd like to get down on Saturday night's games before I hit the sack and perhaps forget by tomorrow.

An angry Steve Yzerman has come out pretty strong against the new product on the ice. From the Detroit Free Press:

"Everybody keeps saying this is great. It's not great," Yzerman said. "It's not hockey."

(snip)

"There are penalties all over," he said. "I'll just use Mathieu Schneider's penalty as an example. He steps up and takes his guy out, and his stick gets caught and the crowd cheers so the referee puts his hand up. There has to be some discretion. The referees have to use some judgment on what is a penalty and what is not. They've taken judgment out of it and I think it's somewhat made it easy on the referees just to call anything, because there is no judgment.

"Good referees used to have good judgment. Now they've taken that out of the game. I'm not saying I'm blaming the referees for it, I just feel the whole thing has to be adjusted and they have to look at this seriously. They can't continue to call irrelevant things that have no business being called."

First of all, somebody find Yzerman's teammate Brendan Shanahan, the moving force behind the NHL Competition Committee, and ask him what he thinks about Yzerman's comments. Why the Free Press reporter didn't go straight for Shanahan's locker after that quote, I'll never know.

Next, say you're Gary Bettman. A few weeks ago, you made sure that coaches Pat Quinn and Randy Carlyle were fined for public comments "critical of the game". Well, if you're going to fine those two, it would seem that to be consistent, you'd have to fine Yzerman as well.

But Yzerman is one of the greatest to ever play the game. Dinging him might prove to be very unpopular, but I can't see how the league can't give him the same treatment.

Then again, Yzerman, who is very likely playing his last year in the NHL, may just not give a damn' about how much he gets fined. Something tells me he won't shut up.

And something else tells me he won't be alone. I was skipping between just about every game tonight, and one of the moments that made the biggest impression was seeing Phoenix's Ladislav Nagy get whistled for holding on what wasn't anything more than incidental contact. Behind the bench, it looked like Wayne Gretzky was going to throw a clot. And he kept that up for most of the game.

What does Bettman do if Gretzky goes public like Yzerman? I mean, if the greatest hockey player of all time thinks you're ruining the game, how can Bettman do anything but lose in the exchange? Stay tuned.

As for me, though I'm happy to have hockey back, and have repeatedly said we need to give the new rules time to shake out, I went nearly out of my mind as the third period of the Edmonton-Chicago game was continually interrupted for power plays. Any flow that might have been established was quickly broken by the seemingly endless string of penalties.

Some other thoughts:

* I could very well be wrong, but it seems to me that we've been seeing more hitting and battling in the corners than we have before -- none more prominent than when Anaheim's Vitali Vishnevsky caught Ian Laperriere with his head down on Friday night. And earlier in the evening, Jonathan Hedstrom hit Ossi Vaananen so hard it dislodged a pane of glass along the boards.

* Am I the only one who seems to think the refs are being a little too quick with the whistle when they lose sight of the puck in the crease? I've seen the puck trickle out of a pile too many times to not ask the question.

* I knew Pavol Demitra was good, but I guess I never really acknowledged just how good he was until I saw him get a hat trick against the Avalanche on Saturday night. He almost made it four goals on a breakaway late in the third, where it seemed like he had a sixth gear skating-wise.

* I know the Canadiens had to play on Friday night, but that performance against the Caps Saturday night was completely ridiculous. It was essentially over early as the Caps scored three goals in the game's first ten minutes, and Montreal never really threatened the rest of the way -- mostly owed to the superior play of Olie Kolzig, who just returned from injury.

* Who would have thought the Caps could win, score five goals, and Alex Ovechkin wasn't involved in any of them. And I'm really beginning to like the Brian Willsie/Jakub Klepis/Thomas Fleischman line.

* On NHL Center Ice on Saturday, the league decided to furnish its viewers with the New Jersey-based feed of the Senators-Devils game, instead of the superior Hockey Night in Canada broadcast. It was a bad decision that shouldn't be repeated.

* Just like the rest of you, I've continually heard how HDTV is going to revolutionize the NHL. Granted, Gary Bettman backed off of that claim in his recent speech at the National Press Club in Washington, but he still held out hope there that it would help attract new fans to the game. If that's the case, then why don't I ever see promotions for the NHL package from HDNet in my local Best Buy? I see endless promos for ESPN and NFL Sunday Ticket, but I never see any hockey. That has to change.

I'm going to bed now. Hope this seems just as relevant on Monday morning.

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE: This isn't going to go away. Other folks are beginning to notice. Like Kukla's Korner. Or Hossim in Ottawa. You knew Tom Benjamin would notice. And the Tao of David is happy that Yzerman agrees with him.

Is this going to go anywhere? If Yzerman plans to keep talking it will.

UPDATE: Here's another thought: If NFL.com can list all their scores on their homepage, then why can't NHL.com do the same?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Ottawa head coach Bryan Murray is disagreeing with Yzerman.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2005 at 1:18 am by Eric McErlain and is filed under Hockey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.