The Circus Has Come To MSG

I wanted to weigh in this morning about the start of last night’s game.  For me, it was a complete waste of time. I’m not a huge advocate of fighting in the NHL but it get it and it certainly has its place. Three fights simultaneously to begin the game is NOT its place. Whenever I talk about fighting in the NHL, I usually pick out the Iginla/Lecavalier fight from the cup finals in 2004. It was two guys battling for the puck and pushing on each other, the fight to win the cup that caused these two to start swinging, not some staged crap at the beginning of the game. I’m sorry but I thought the circus had already come to town. 

First off, Peter Deboer, don’t stand there mouth agape because of what you are seeing. You sent your 4th liners out to begin the game. You wanted a fight, maybe not  all 3 to begin fighting but you wanted something. Your quote after the game just proves that.

“I guess in John’s world you can come into our building and start your tough guys, but we can’t do the same here,” DeBoer told reporters. “He’s either got short-term memory loss or he’s a hypocrite.”

And don’t think I am going to let Tortorella off the hook. He’s just as responsible. Had he lined up his first liners, this would have been avoided. In fact, he probably would have been able to pin the Devils deep to start the game but no, he sends out his goon squad to match our goon squad and goes one step further to line Stu Bickel up at center and moved Dubinsky back for the faceoff. For those not familiar, Bickel is a defenseman. Had they dress Scott, no doubt in my mind he would have been up on the line.

The start of that game, at least for me was a circus. It was faker than the WWE, complete bush league, Slapshot Hanson brother’s kind of Goon hockey. It resulted in a brawl, something that DeBoer obviously set out to do. Maybe that shit flew in Florida, I don’t know but here in NJ, that is NOT how we do things. It was a waste of everyone’s time and resulted in one of our best defenseman getting a 10 minute misconduct for jumping in and trying to help Carter after getting his head bashed in.

I know I am a minority in my thinking. I know there are many out there that got jacked up by what they saw but, like I said above, for me, it was a circus. I was embarrassed by what my team did and I can’t believe that Lou liked what he saw. I think it set an awful tone to start the game but please, let me know what you think of the whole thing.