The NHL’s Senior Vice President and overseer of Player Safety and Hockey Operations, Brendan Shanahan, released some comments yesterday regarding his decision not to suspend New York Rangers forward Wojtek Wolski for an illegal blow to Daniel Alfredsson’s head.
According to Shanahan:
“Well I just had a conversation with Daniel Alfredsson again today on this. This is about education as well. Wolski is not a dirty player and has no history of being a dirty player. There are collisions that occur on the ice where unfortunately, when one player sees it just prior… on this play here, Wolski has to get out to his point… you see here, Gaborik, the left-winger has to come all the way over to Wolski’s point on the right side because Wolski’s not there. He ran into Alfredsson trying to get there. We’ve seen enough of these now and I don’t like these… but we’ve seen enough of them where when one players sees it just prior, he just tenses up and sometimes he even leans in because he’s bracing for an impact. When both guys see it, it’s two guys tensing up – both guys bounce off of each other and everybody’s fine. It’s really unfortunate here when one player doesn’t see it and the other one does. Now if I felt that it was intentional or if it wasn’t at the last instant just prior… if I ever felt that there was any sort of sneakiness or history of these types of offences by Wolski, he would have been suspended.”
It’s even more unfortunate when everyone else sees it and the disciplinarian doesn’t…
Senators fans are pissed off and deservedly so. This very well could be Daniel Alfredsson’s final season in Ottawa and it’s a shame to see him spend part of it on the sidelines with a concussion.
The elbow was intentional. It was at the last instant just prior. The ‘sneaky’ nature of the hit has been pointed out by others. Are we supposed to feel better knowing that the only reputation that matters to Shanahan is that Wolski is better known for being a lazy, chronic underachiever than a dirty player?
(Sigh) I would tell fans to move on and get over this but I’m the guy who keeps penning articles linking the Sens to Kyle Turris.
The explanation that Shanahan offered was just salt in the wound.
Here’s the video footage of the explanation below:
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