By: John Coppinger
Welcome once again to “This Week in NHL Stupid”, where we track the ugly, the silly, and the just plain stupid in the world of hockey. Now, we do this thing on a weekly basis as you may know. It’s very rare that somebody makes the Stupid list twice, let alone two weeks in a row for the exact same thing. But it takes a rare player to do the impossible. And that player … is Brad Marchand.
Here’s what he did last week to land on the list:
Marchand was only fined $10,000 for the hit, a possible precursor to Marchand feeling emboldened enough to try it again at some point.
But the very next week?
Now, to be fair, I don’t know what’s in Marchand’s heart. And more importantly, I don’t know what he’s looking at down the ice to make him swerve back and forth like that. Let’s assume for the purposes of this argument that Marchand’s heart is pure, and what’s happening off screen is some sort of apocalyptic hell scape that is causing him to have second thoughts on direction. Why even risk a suspension by coming close to a player without the puck? If it’s accidental, it’s reckless. I’m sorry, when this happens twice in a short period of time, the benefit of the doubt is lost. And while Marchand may revel in being the second coming of the Little Ball of Hate, the fact is: He’s too good a hockey player to go over the line. He doesn’t need to do it.
But he’ll keep doing it, because the punishment for Marchand didn’t go up for the second slew foot in a week. It went down … to nothing! Heck, even Chris Pronger was fined five bucks for hitting Justin Bieber. (Sure, it was a self-imposed fine, but still.) Once again, the league is stupider than the player. And in an attempt to stay ahead of themselves, the league tried to top themselves in stupidity by making goaltenders wear smaller pants in the middle of the season. Is it a good rule that makes sense? Maybe. I’m not the judge of that. But changing anything in the middle of the season is asinine, no matter how minute it might be like pants. (Especially something that minute, because why waste time and energy to rush in a change like this?) Goalies should have a preseason to test out their version of skinny jeans.
Then we had a couple of “almost stupids”. Like T.J. Oshie almost sending his coach to the hospital.
Red Bull gives you a trip to the hospital.
Or the Senators almost giving the Tampa Bay Lightning a freebie.
And finally, let’s pour one out for Ken Hitchcock, whose Blues career came to a premature end as he was fired from a job he was going to step down from just months later. Stupid to fire a coach that was leaving anyway because the goaltending was abysmal? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
