Shootout at the Rodge

everybody grab a partner

Holy cow, what a bout at Rogers Arena. Two seconds into the Calgary/Vancouver finale to Hockey Day in Canada, every player on the ice except the goalies got into a fight and when the penalties were assessed, 176 minutes were assigned, including four game misconducts. The Canucks’ coach lost his mind and started screaming at the Flames’ coach, the players on either bench were chirping back and forth, the guys in the penalty boxes continued verbally abusing each other after the doors closed, and it took me forty minutes to get the dinner dishes done because Ter kept yelling at me to “come and see this!”

It was unbelievable, if only because no one in the game was wearing a vintage Flyer jersey. It got crazier at the end of the first period, too. The Vancouver coach was seized outside the Flames’ locker room, apparently intent on berating (or worse) the Calgary coach during the intermission. This set off the talking heads between periods; one guy was so upset that he couldn’t focus on anything else they might have discussed about what hockey had been played so far. Eventually, the teams did settle down and the game progressed, but with the shortened benches on either side, it was like watching two periods of playoff overtime when the guys are so tired they start tripping over the blue line and bumping into each other. They were tied 2-2 at the end of regulation, and still tied after 5 minutes of 4-on-4 OT, so appropriately enough, they went to a shootout. Vancouver won in the fifth round.

I could only imagine what my younger older brother must have been saying. The Canucks are his team. They were mine, too, last night, because I really dislike the Flames, but I must hand it to them—they gave us a darned good show of “ we went to the fights and a hockey game broke out”. It was wild.

Some form of league discipline is likely to be delivered to the Vancouver coach for his behaviour. Whatever he was doing in the corridor between periods had everyone up in arms. Even I can’t figure out what the heck he was thinking. He might have been choked at the visiting team playing their fourth line at the puck drop, which resulted in him having to send in his goons … The saddest thing is that one kid had been called up from the minors to play his first NHL game, his folks had flown out from Ontario to see him play, and he got tossed from it in the first two seconds. I still can’t get my head around it. In the old days, stuff like this happened all the time; they say the quietest room in the league was the visitors’ locker room in Philadelphia (oh, yeah, babe), and though scraps and staged dances are sprinkled throughout an 82 game season, for the most part, bench-clearing brawls don’t happen anymore. Philly is still the most penalized team in the league, but that’s guilt by historic association. It might also be untrue after last Saturday night.

Was it a good game? Yeah, it was. I loved it. No peace-loving beatnikery here, boy. I have a dark side. I also disagree vehemently with hits from behind and deliberate attempts to injure; fights don’t cause injuries the way sticks and knees and numbers-crunching do. I love the speed and skill of a fast forward, but I also admire the third and fourth line players, the guys who don’t score that much but can motivate their team by causing a ruckus or pulling the other guy’s jersey over his head. Saturday night was a tad extreme, and I do feel bad about the kid from the minors, and I cannot condone the coach’s conduct, but it was fitting that, in a day of celebrating the great Canadian game, the final match was a shootout in the wild, wild west.