There is a segment of hockey fans that have always wanted to watch the bubble of hockey men discussing hockey things get totally pierced by even just the smallest bit of logic. For that is the true enemy of most things that have been hockey ethos. So a hearty thank you to Jennifer Botterill, who during an intermission of Sportsnet’s coverage last night turned Jamal Mayers and Sam Cosentino into her personal mop.
A little background: The discussion centered around back-to-back incidents in back-to-back games between the Minnesota Wild and the Winnipeg Jets last week. And you’ll have to stick with me here, because the set-up gets dizzyingly HOCKEY. In the first game in Winnipeg. Minnesota’s Kirill Kaprizov and the Jets’ Brenden Dillon had a bit of a back-and-forth. Kaprizov “reverse-hit” Dillon in the corner, i.e., used possession of the puck as an excuse to shoulder into Dillon. In response, Dillon crosschecked Kaprizov twice in the small of the back, knocking Kaprizov out of the game.
Ok, got that? Pretty simple right? Good, because it’s going to get loopy. Two nights later, in the return game back in St. Paul, Ryan Hartman exacted the Wild’s revenge by using a faceoff as an excuse to whack Cole Perfetti in the face with his stick.
Just settle on that for a second. One player who was not involved with the first incident thought it was justice to cheapshot an unsuspecting player who also was not involved with the first incident. It would have been just as apt for Hartman to crawl over the boards and spear some jamoke with a beer in the fifth row. But according to hockey, it all adds up.
Now that you’ve got a semblance of a handle on that, watch Mayers and Cosentino mouth heave their various defenses of Hartman’s actions before Botterill makes them look like the overgrown children they almost certainly are acting like:
It’s not really Mayers’s fault, because he was brought up in hockey culture and thinking, and made his living by it. Though Mayers’s contention that the playoffs reverse the game five years in thinking is way off base, considering that fighting completely disappears when the players only care about getting the next win. Though Mayers wouldn’t know, as he ended up a healthy scratch pretty regularly on the few playoff teams he was a part of.
Cosentino tries to be the voice of . . . well, not reason, because he only misses that be a few acres, but argues that it would have been OK if Hartman had gone after one of the Jets better players, seeing as how Dillon labeled the Wild’s best players. Again, it’s justifiable in hockey to blindly maul yet another unsuspecting player because he happens to be really good at the sport as long as your guy, who is also really good at the sport, has been harmed in some way.
Botterill comes from the world of women’s hockey, where she had a very distinguished career winning three gold medals and a scoring championship in the CWHL, which contains none of this silliness. She’s not so deep in the forest that she can’t see none of this added up in the least.
It’s rare we get to see the fallacy of “OLD TIMEY HOCKEY” put in such clear relief, and the optics of a woman piercing the stupidity of two guys talking like morons is worth more than a chuckle. Hopefully, Mayers and Cosentino will hang a few more curveballs for Botterill before the season is over.
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Original source here
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