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Originally Posted by J Flex 188
Bill I saw video of that Hartnell hit and as much as it pains me to see Cheechoo go down (since he was on my fantasy team...and wasnt that productive during the season  ) I dont think Hartnell did it intentionally, but he got the game misconduct anyways. Haven't heard anything about suspensions yet. Radulov's goals were pretty ridiculous for Nashville though. The Western Conference playoffs are definitely more ramped up than I have seen in a long time. I'm waiting to see if anyone breaks that old 110 min extra record back in the 30's? I think with Montreal and another team
ps. Does anyone cheer for Anaheim down there? I watched the third period of the game against the Wild and all I can see is that Penner was pretty lucky! |
Intentional or not, when you high stick someone you're responsible for your stick. If the NHL wanted to be just in their disciplinary action they would suspend players for as long as the player they injured remains out of the lineup at a minimum. Cheech had made his move to his left around Hartnell and Hartnell instinctively wanted to get a piece of him so as not to be behind the play and stuck his knee out. It’s just a dangerous play that shouldn’t happen in the league, and if it was the other way around and a Shark did it I’d think there should be action taken, too. Losing Cheechoo is huge despite his lack of another 56 goal season (37 sure isn’t bad, though) since he’s one of Thornton’s three one-time shot options on our power-play (Carle in the high slot and Rivet on the point being the others) not to mention it takes his chemistry with Thornton from the past year and a half and nullifies it if he remains out of the lineup. Thankfully Joe Pavelski and Mark Smith are healthy enough to step into the lineup and play regular shifts if need be.
By the way, everyone's talking about the knee-on-knee, but no one is talking about the elbow to his head that knocked out a tooth...
As for the Ducks… There are always fans of away teams in every city, but the vast majority of people up here dislike all the other Pacific Division teams, especially Anaheim (because they’ve been good in recent years) and Dallas (for signing Ed Belfour less than an hour after he became unrestricted after the Sharks gave up 3 good players to get him... those of us longtime Sharks fans will never forgive Belfour for that, either).
Radulov is a great player. You can see similarities between him and a very young Martin Havlat when he broke into the league or like Ales Hemsky on Hemsky’s good days. Just a slick averaged sized guy who has confidence with the puck and feels he can do anything with it. As a hockey fan it’s great to see, but as a Sharks fan it hurts. In every series there are players from Team A that will give Team B fits and vice versa, I just hope that Steve Sullivan stays out of Nashville’s lineup otherwise it’ll be even more difficult for the Sharks, since he has had incredible success against them in his career.