Running NHL 2023-24 regular season thread

Few people on earth thought Steve Moore brought on what Bertuzzi did.

But welcome to SJ.com, where you can bet a post like that is going to idiotically be compared to some extreme that nobody thinks is remotely the same thing. It's clear he wasn't saying anything like that.

He qualified what he said about what is and isn't disproportionate with this:

As in, if you show up another team or act like a jerkoff in a way that everyone with an actual brain and can make normal distinctions sees, you should be prepared for an angry opponent.

 

This isn't about what I think.

But what I do know is that the two things are nothing like each other.

First, there was no penalty in the original game against Moore and the league ruled it a legal hit when it reviewed the game.

I get that Vancouver saw things differently, they thought it was a shit player going after a superstar.

OK, get your retribution. No retribution in the game. ...

The next game against Colorado. ... no retribution.

Skip ahead a few weeks, to get to the incident you brought out of nowhere. Matt Cooke challenged Moore to a fight early in the game. ... and Moore fought him!

What Bertuzzi did? It was toward the end of a game weeks later, Moore had already had to fight, presumably because of the Naslund hit. ... but. ... Bertuzzi starts stalking him around the ice late in the game, and when Moore is ignoring him, Bertuzzi grabs him and sucker punches him and knocks him out cold.

That basic set of facts is nothing like what happened Rielly and Grieg, where Grieg unambiguously crossed a basic sportsmanship line. ... and Rielly just reacted in the moment in a way a normal person could kind of understand.

 

I don't know what Burke wrote, and I generally think Burke is trying to be a straight shooter (even when I don't see things his way). But, 1) when Bertuzzi did that, it wasn't THAT late in the game, as it turns out when I looked back. It was about halfway through the third period. I can't see how Colorado was asking for that, especially because Moore had taken the fight. ... if you want to talk about "hockey culture," it's you get called out, you have to fight, and the fight ends it. 2) Moore sued and who knows how bad he made it sound in the lawsuit. But he had three fractured vertebrae, ligament damage and nerve damage, not to mention a severe concussion (grade 3). He was hospitalized .I don't know how you exaggerate that kind of thing, unless the reporting of the extent of the injuries was just complete BS.

 

That timeline is the point. Putting aside that the only reason this is now a sidetrack is that you were trying to pin @Sea Bass to some ridiculous extreme. ... circumstancially the extreme you came up with is an apple to an orange.

Rielly reacted out of anger in the moment. He didn't assault Grieg after 6 or 7 periods of hockey went by in which nobody addressed it. It wasn't after another player forced Grieg to fight because of it. What he did wasn't premeditated.

He got pissed and reacted in the moment.

On top of that, what Rielly did, even with the dangerous crosscheck, was not even in the same zip code of brutality. Nor was what precipitated it similar. It wasn't a slightly ambiguous offense, like an elbow that wasn't penalized or given a suspension upon review. Grieg was showing up Toronto with that exaggerated slap shot into an empty net.

 

It wasn't "elbow to the head" like he threw a gratuitous elbow at a guy's head. Naslund was reaching for a puck and was bent really far over, and Moore hit him in what ended in a really awkward collision. Of course there was ambiguity. There was no penalty called, and the league reviewed it and agreed that it was a legal hit. Vancouver, on the other hand, thought it was a cheap shot against their star goal scorer.

Nobody is going to debate whether Greig was showing up Toronto by taking a slap shot on a breakaway into an empty net. There is no ambiguity about what was going on there.