Brooks Orpik doesn
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March 6th, 2006
The Waiting Game
Brooks Orpik doesn
“When a guy plays the game on the edge, he’s inevitably going to hurt people every now and again. “
By the same token, when a guy plays on the edge, he’s going to get hurt every now and again. Not many players are ballsy enough to put themselves in the position Cole was in. He knew Orpik was bearing down on him, and made a gutsy decision when he could have easily peeled away. That’s what distinguishes Cole from a player like Stillman.
A long time ago, long before he came to Carolina, I made peace with Jesse Boulerice.
I mean, let’s look at this–Boulerice has never tried to justify what he did. He’s never tried to defend it, he’s never tried to make himself look like the wronged party, and he’s had no repeat incidents. Plenty of fans have tried to justify that horrifying incident, but every time Jesse’s been asked about it he’s been pretty consistent in saying that it was stupid of him to do it and that he wishes he could have that moment back so he could make a better decision and NOT swing that stick.
But hey, don’t let me keep you from swinging the tar brush at me.
Without having seen the Orpik hit, I believe the NHL needs a clear-cut way to differentiate between a player who turns into the boards at the last moment before a hit and embellishes a check to make it seem more violent than it was as opposed to a truly vicious, blindside intent-to-injure check. I’ve seen too many of the former this season that resulted in unwarrented penalties IMO and several vicious blindside hits that went uncalled.
I’m all for protecting players from cheapshot hits that cause injury, but I also like to see some physical play. However, the way the game is being called now, there’s very little hard, finish-the-check hitting. It’s making it almost impossible to play defense and taking some of the fun out of the game.
If the league wants to reduce the chance of injury, it could adopt an automatic icing rule, and ban hip checks along the boards. It could also start calling diving penalties when players embellish hits along the boards that they see them coming.
Good hockey is played physically and passionately, not with a purse.
The problem with the whole ‘I want this guy chopped up and set on fire because he put a dirty hit on a guy’ thing is well, eventually a player on your favorite team is going to lay a dirty hit out there too.
Not sure why people just don’t say we want him fined and suspended because he injured a guy on my favorite team. That is all it really is, isn’t it? It doesn’t really have anything to do with the hit being dirty, or accidental. It is that Cole got injured because Brooks hit him.
It is an understandable reaction from a fan, not sure why people just don’t say that rather than try to justify it with a bunch of nonsense about Billy Tibbets. If the Carolina scouts find a guy they think can play hockey whatever he did in his past, if that guy is free for Carolina to sign, they will sign him. I do not believe any hockey team has an ethics test players have to pass before the team signs them.
Hell, I would lay money that Colorado would take Bertuzzi in a moment if he was cheap enough.
There are no morals or ethics in sports. Or if there is I don’t see it. There are the presures of winning and losing and making money while doing it.
Nicanor