What happened last night in Nashville was ridiculous, and the league has shown its true colors. I know the limit on player fines is set in the CBA and that's fine (even if a 2,500 limit is laughably low), but this incident has made it abundantly clear to anyone with functioning brain cells where the league's real priorities are:words are worse than violence. The standard suggested here is insane, intolerable, and has no place in civilized competition.

What Zetterberg "did" to Weber in the half-second before the incident happens a hundred times in a hockey game. Using it as an excuse to not suspend him is ridiculous--if a Detroit player makes a run at Weber at puck drop tomorrow, will he evade suspension? After all, he was just retaliating. What about Zetterberg? Did he have to be injured to justify a suspension? Shove a gun in someone's face and pull the trigger only to have it wrestled away from you or deflected at the last second: good luck convincing a jury you had no malicious intent to injure the other person.

I know I'm a Red Wings fan and all but this is just disgusting. If it were a borderline hit or something--fine--those can go either way. But grabbing a player's head and slamming it face-first into the glass should never be acceptable.

Gary Bettmann and the NHL should be ashamed of themselves. I can't in good conscience encourage people to follow or support a game that is run like this.

I tried to post the first couple lines of this as my status in FB, but it's way too long and my friends don't care enough about hockey to read notes so I figured I'd share this here:

Okay look, Barry Trotz is a great coach. I'm not taking that away form him; he deserves an Adams nomination most years and this is no exception. But Vigneault? Where was Mike Babcock's Adams trophy when the Red Wings were the ones walking all over the rest of the league?

Similarly, Dan Bylsma of the Pens has been nominated, presumably for getting his team to the playoffs without Crosby and Malkin. Where was Babcock's Adams trophy when he made it to the playoffs (and won the first round) with an AHL team?

As far as the Norris trophy goes, I don't think he quite belongs on the list but reasonable men could disagree as to whether Chara deserves the hardware or not. But last time I checked, Babcock is already one of the best/most successful coaches in the League and he's only been at it since '02. The man has missed the playoffs one time in eight years. He has been in the SCF *four times,* which means his teams win their Conference a full 50% of the time. How has this man not won an Adams?

tl;dr nothing against Trotz or Bylsma, but Babcock is *demonstrably* superior to both as a head coach, Vigneault's nomination surprises me on the grounds that the Nucks have done this year what we've basically been doing for the last fifteen, but we seldom get an Adams nod for it.

Let me start by saying that of the Penguins selected, I probably hate Crosby the most but he also happens to be about the only one of the four--FOUR--of them (the other three being Malkin, Letang and Fleury) that deserves to be an All-Star starter this year.

So what the hell happened here? Malkin is a whopping thirty-eighth in the league for points. Thirty-eighth! And he's a starter! Letang, hilariously enough, is immediately behind him at 39. To put it into perspective, the closest Wing to Malkin/Letang points-wise is Johan Franzen. I like Mule and all, but is he really having an All-Star year? Fuck no. Malkin has even less of a case considering the numbers he usually puts up.

In Letang's case, I'll grant that he has a beastly plus-minus, but remember last year when everyone was raving about how great Mike Green was with his world-eating stats? Where is he now? Oh, that's him down there at #30... among defensemen. Letang being +20 right now probably has more to do with Crosby than Letang, just like how Lidstrom being even has more to do with the rest of the team than it does with Lidstrom.

Don't get me started on Fleury: before last year's Final, he was probably the worst goaltender to have ever won a Stanley Cup. I'll grant that he's put up reasonable numbers this year (particularly in GAA) but there's still at least ten goaltenders I'd rather have between the pipes in any given game. Where is Tim Thomas? Or Ondrej Pavelec?

Memo to Pens fans: All-Star ballots are meant to reflect who the best players are, not your favorites. I love the Red Wings' roster this year, but as singular entities only a few of them are really All-Stars in any given year. You [redacted] homers ruined the All-Star voting by not being able to see past your own noses. Lrn2hockey.

Okay, here's the thing.  It seems there's a virulent hatred for the Hawks this year among my fellow Wings fans, which I understand to an extent. For the record I'm still rooting for Philly but I wanted to play Devil's Advocate for a minute--just a minute--to make a point or two about the Chicago hockey market.

Not too long ago some or other publication offered up a list of the top ten or twenty most stubborn fans in the sports world. A talk radio guy rattled them off, subsequently insisting that excessive loyalty to a team is a weakness and not a strength. He prefaced the countdown by saying "If you're a fan of any of these teams, you're stubborn." Cleveland Browns fans clocked in at #1 and #2 was the Toronto Maple Leafs. The Flames were in there somewhere too but that's not the point.

The point is that the teams that do best tend to come from the markets where ownership is held accountable for the team's performance by the fans and local media. If you're a Yankees manager and you screw up the team, they'll kill you. They just don't put up with that crap out there. But take a club like the Mariners, for example, and you get this wishy-washy "oh we're just glad to be competitive" nonsense, which is no good for the team and is not an attitude one deploys to win championships.

What does this all have to do with the Hawks? Well, as I'm sure we can all remember, they sucked pretty badly and pretty recently to boot. During the opening round, I heard a lot of people mock Phoenix fans for similar reasons, citing some pre-season drive to promote the team that only like 20 people attended. But they make it to the playoffs and lo and behold--the arena sells out.

But isn't that the way it should be? If a team's management consistently produces shoddy product, why reward them by buying their tickets? I don't think it's fair to rag on a fanbase (even if your argument is that there was none) for being utterly disinterested in a crappy, mismanaged team. The 'Yotes franchise was handled poorly for years, but they came around and gave us a good series, and to me that's what matters in the end. I could almost give a hoot about how many 'true' fans they have; I like it when cities get into the game and support their team even if it's one I don't root for.