old time hockey

How rowdy has the NHL been the past couple of weeks?  Line brawls, goalie fights, guys hoppin off the bench to scrap, it feels like the 1970's all over again!  While there has been a lot of talk of how this has brought negative attention to the league, I personally love it.  The two games that really boiled over were Boston Montreal, and Pittsburgh New York.  In both cases we have division rivals who clearly don't like each other, and incidents in the previous games played carried over.  In the previous Bruins Habs game Max Pacioretty took a shot at Zdeno Chara which sparked a melee with no time left on the clock.  Pacioretty now knows that Chara is a giant that is probably better off left asleep.  Boston is a big, physical team, and Montreal is one of the smaller teams in the league.  While the Habs can't afford to play many games against the Bruins like this, I love how the team stood up for one another and didn't back down.  In the other game, the Islanders were upset about a Maxime Talbot's hit (which I thought was clean) that left Blake Comeau concussed, and a Brent Johnson one punch that left Rick DiPietro with a broken face.  The Islanders responded by rallying every single goon within their organization and sent them out to cause havoc against the Pens.  The game turned into a blowout fast, which certainly didn't help.  I thought Matt Martin's sucker punch on Talbot deserved more than a 4 game suspension, as luckily Talbot wasn't hurt but it was shockingly similar to the Bertuzzi incident on Steve Moore and I thought the NHL would have taken a tougher stand against such a play.  Islanders rookie Michael Haley, who had 27 PIMs in the game, will almost certainly be jumped the next time these two teams play.  You need to earn a little bit of respect in this league before you start running around like a mad man and picking fights with goalies.