Captain's Log: Supplemental

...in which pretty much all I do is complain about the officiating.

Let's get the easiest one to swallow out of the way first: the Avery/Tortorella saga. We've already covered most of the ridiculousness there, but I just wanna add that I really believe that the officials took Avery out of this series with a conscious, if not organized, effort to penalize him so often for so many things that he now can't (or at least feels like he can't - who can say which?) finish a check without going to the box. Granted, I also feel like Avery didn't do himself, or us, any favors at the end of Game 4.

But let's get to the real meat of things: Brashear's hit on Betts, and the Brandon Dubinsky Finger Incident (band name?). You may recall mention of a certain hit about 9:50 (Betts had played about 1:40 so far) into the game that took Betts out of not only the game, but Game 7 and, presumably, the theoretical beyond. The hit broke an orbital bone (yes, kids, those are the ones we use to keep our eyes in). Let's start by reviewing the hit.



You can watch the whole video if you want, but the portion that matters starts 0:47 into the video. Now, this is a hit that went completely unpenalized. In fact, play continued for a few seconds before Mara went after Brashear, and each of them got 2 for roughing. No other calls on the play.

Now, it is unclear from the video whether or not Brashear's elbow made contact with Betts, or just his shoulder. Bruce Boudreau claimed that it was clearly just the shoulder. But here's the point I want to make: no one at all should be discussing which body part Brashear hit him with. Boudreau is referring to Rule 46.1: "Elbowing shall mean the use of an extended elbow in a manner that may or may not cause injury." The claim is that there is no foul to be found, technically speaking, unless Brashear followed through with the elbow. This is insultingly far from the point, and it speaks to a real gap in the NHL's thinking. They will call every little holding or hooking penalty they can find. If a stick comes up around a midsection, a penalty is called, in the name of "not slowing down the game." But if Brashear doesn't make contact with the elbow, it's a clean hit.

Let me be very clear about this. I've referred to it before, talking about the difference between Avery being a pain in the ass and a player who is actually dirty. This is a hit that is designed to injure. Watch it again. Betts dumps the puck in, and he's going for a change. His body is defenseless, he's away from the play. Brashear knows this. He comes at him from the back, where Betts can't see him, and he charges with all the force he can. Hockey players understand this. People who never watch hockey have a lot of trouble seeing the difference, but players don't. When you're in the game, you're skating, you're checking, you're hitting, your body is poised. Betts was out of the play, retiring to the bench, and never saw Brashear coming. When they talk about "late hits," they are talking about hits on players whose bodies are relaxed. This is textbook.

It is people like Donald Brashear that inspire me to come to Avery's defense so often. Sean Avery is a prick. He's irritating. He gets on everyone's nerves. It's, frankly, pretty sweet. But he has never, to my knowledge, done anything in order to cause injury to another player. Piss him off? Call his mother a whore? Sure. But not ever actually stop him from taking the ice. That's the difference. Everyone who watched that play knew Betts's body was unprepared for a hit. Brashear knew. That's why Brashear went after him. The NHL talks about how they have to "clean up the game," so they suspend Torts for squirting water at a fan, and they send Avery to counseling for talking about sex, and they call a minor on every hook anywhere on the ice. But they market Brashear as a "tough, physical veteran" and Avery as "the least liked player in the league." You know what? People may get annoyed by players like Avery or Esa Tikkanen. But I gotta believe that your average NHL player is way more put off by the kind of guy that purposely looks to take a guy like Blair Betts out of his career.

Epilogue: The NHL had a hearing today to discuss what to do about Brashear. They ended up suspending him 5 games for the hit, plus an additional game for starting up with Colton Orr in the pre-game warmup. This is good, he deserves suspension. But I'm having trouble getting it to feel too much like justice. You know I wouldn't make a claim like "if it hadn't been for this one thing, we would have won." We got outplayed in Game 6, for all the reasons I outlined. But...Blair Betts is our best faceoff man, and we couldn't get puck possession throughout the game. Also, Blair Betts is our best penalty killer. Through the first 5 games, our PK was quite strong, holding the incredibly dynamic Caps to a series-shaping 4 PPG in 28 minors for 41:23 of power play time. With Betts out of Game 6, they scored 2 PPG on 5 minors that only added up to 4:00 of power play time. 2 is the number of goals by which we lost this contest. I'm not drawing any conclusions here - I report, you decide. I'm just sayin'.

Overshadowed by this nonsense was the weird Dubinsky-Morrisonn biting incident. Apparently, when Dubinsky and Morrisonn came together with 5 minutes left in the second, Morrisonn bit Dubi on the wrist. Apparently, when he tried to show this to the linesman, the linesman determined that Dubi was being unsportsmanlike about it, and that's what led to Dubi's 10-minute misconduct.

It's hard to figure out the details here, but we know Dubi went to get a tetanus shot this morning. Morrisonn, of course, claims he didn't bite Dubi. It seems hard to believe that a dude would bite a dude, but then, Jarkko Ruutu did it, and it seems hard to believe that Dubi would make the whole thing up in the middle of the game like that. And get angry enough about it that he gets a misconduct for it?

Anyway, at the very least, it's very confusing. Surely, it's not as depressing as the Betts loss. But I do have trouble with the idea that a guy got a 10-minute misconduct for, presumably, getting bitten. Whatever. I somehow just got over this bullshit, unacceptable as it is. I mean, Dubinsky got bitten on the wrist, had to go for a tetanus shot this morning, and got a 10-minute misconduct for trying to tell the linesman about it. There is no goddamn way to spin that positively. It is terrible. And I won't get into what losing our second-best faceoff guy did to our chances of winning Game 6, either. There's nothing you can do about this shit. We have to just move on. Game 7 is tomorrow. That's the important thing.