Steve Mason.
For all the times I saw that name or a variation of it, perhaps Tyler Seguin was the better one.
This was the guy who supposedly partied harder than a Center City Flyers post game celebration, and he wasn’t even able to legally drink yet. The kid who worked through a virtual nonstop hangover to earn being benched by the Bruins when they needed him most during a Stanley Cup Finals, and was labeled an immature diva before being shuffled along to Dallas in exchange for Loui Eriksson.
Hindsight being 20/20, I have to wonder if the Bruins jumped the gun a bit on this one. All Seguin has done since arriving in Dallas is focus himself on displaying his potential, which was already abundant enough without being slighted in the first place. He has developed some solid chemistry with the other budding Dallas superstar Jamie Benn, and the duo have been absolute magic for a Stars club still in rebuilding mode.
With two chips like this in place, the future is seriously bright, and the Flyers got a full demonstration of exactly what that means a day after a furious ice storm wrecked havoc on the state of Texas and the Midwest at large. Things for the Flyers didn’t exactly get off on the good foot when Zac Rinaldo decided to channel a little of his vintage magic and attack Stars agitator Antione Roussel. Roussel didn’t fight back, and Rinaldo proceeded to tally 27 pims and put the Flyers on a 7 minute penalty kill, and this was only minutes into the game. The Stars would land another power play in the period, and the Flyers wound up spending nearly half of the first on the PK, a move that had to be the source of their downfall in the contest.
Despite being at an extreme disadvantage throughout the first, the Flyers still emerged out of the first period with a 1-0 lead, thanks to some skillful play by Wayne Simmonds, who dragged goalie Dan Ellis out of position with some patient maneuvers, and defenseman Andrej Meszaros cashing in as a result. Coupling this score with some pretty insane goaltending by Steve Mason, and things sort of looked up for Philly.
The second period is where the Tyler Seguin show began. Together with Jamie Benn, and Calder contending rookie Valeri Nichushkin, they proceeded to erase the name Steve Mason from my twitter feed, and create a level of silence everywhere BUT in a half filled American Airlines Center(no thanks to said horrible ice storm), running rampant on an exposed and fatigued Flyers defense. Seguin collected a natural hat trick in the process, notching goals 14,15 & 16 along the way. Again, I’m not entirely sure if the Flyers hadn’t already been burned out in the first from all the PK time, but either way, it was still an impressive demonstration of offense for Seguin, and only shows that his star (no pun) is definitely on the rise again.
The third featured the Flyers usual trend of outshooting opponents but to no avail. The game was way out of hand at this point, Mason had been hung out to dry, and Emery faired no better behind the tired defense, surrendering a goal on 8 shots faced. It’s hard to blame anyone for trying to play through adversity, frankly all the blame deserved to fall on Rinaldo for this. His antics left the club drained and unable to really recover from it during the next 40 minutes.
I will however like to play Devil’s Advocate and mention the current soup du jour occurring in the NHL these days, and two games featured this very incident, of players doing something that more than likely warranted honoring the code of answering for whatever they were instigating, only to flop on the ice or avoid a retaliation fight. I honestly don’t think Rinaldo does something this early for absolutely no reason whatsoever, and granted he should have let it go, but Roussel had to have said or done something that no one is aware of that set him off. Anyone who’s watched Rinaldo knows he takes a little bit to boil over, and this was all of a minute in. Another incident like this occurred in the Bruins-Penguins tilt where Brooks Orpik driving his shoulder into the skull of forward Loui Eriksson triggered a cataclysm of events that has the hockey world scorning Shawn Thornton right now. Orpik concussed a fellow player and was challenged by Thornton repeatedly only to rebuff it. Things escalated in severely violent fashion when the Penguins not having learned from the borderline cheap shot on Eriksson, decided to knee a prone Brad Marchand in the head, and from there Thornton lost his cool and the rest is history.
People want to bash fighting in hockey, and now they’ll use every excuse to challenge it’s presence no thanks to what Thornton did, but honestly speaking, IF Orpik answers that bell, faces Thornton and either takes his licking for injuring a player or even defeats Thornton, the entire situation would have been squashed. It all breaks down to people assuming that it’s cool to legitimately hurt someone else, then acting surprised when called out for it.
If hockey fans want to condone a guy burying his shoulder into another players face, then whine when that guy was asked to answer for it only for things to get worse, then I truly feel sorry for the hockey world at large.
Simply put, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
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