ANAHEIM >> The news cycle went into overdrive between Games 4 and 5. And we’re not talking about affairs of state.
Most of it concerned the leftovers from Anaheim’s overtime win in Nashville Thursday.
In ascending importance, Ducks captain Ryan Getzlaf got fined $10,000 for an epithet he delivered to the officials from the Anaheim bench.
It was a homophobic expression, approximately the same as the one used by Chicago’s Andrew Shaw last year in Game 4 of a first-round series against St. Louis.
Shaw was suspended for that Game 5. Getzlaf was not suspended for this Game 5. So we’ll hear a lot of byplay about that.
It was already on the minds of Canadians because Blue Jays outfielder Kevin Pillar got a one-game suspension for the same type of thing, delivered toward an Atlanta pitcher.
Shaw also was asked to attend sensitivity training sessions. Sounds more like he and Getzlaf need vocabulary adjustments
Referring to someone as a body part or a descendent of an animal is presumably more appropriate.
Maybe we should expand our definition of an obscenity. There are certainly things in life that are universally despised.
The next time an official makes a bad call, the players should be trained to yell, “You telemarketer!”
Or maybe, “You son of a Madoff!”
Or “Go to LAX!”
Stuff like that.
This is called the heat of the battle. If you don’t want to reflect just how hot it can be, be a little more prudent with your microphones and cameras.
This used to happen a lot when Tiger Woods was playing golf. He would hit one sideways and react the way millions of golfers do, with the same colorful expressions, and we would shoo our children out of the room.
The networks and the golf officials knew exactly what the risk was, and yet they insisted on getting “up close and personal.”
HBO broadcasts all kinds of things said in the corners of championship fighters, yet none of that is sanitized because it’s on premium cable, if that makes any sense.
Many of us in our business are happy that nobody is sound-checking us when our computers go haywire on deadline. I assume most TV folks are happy that all conversations in “the truck” are not in the public domain.
That said, Getzlaf and others should learn from this. If the goal is to bar all homophobic language from hockey and the face of the earth, that’s certainly desirable.
And the question of why Getzlaf doesn’t miss a game when Shaw did is a really, really good one.
It was just another blow to Nashville, which lost center Ryan Johansen in Game 4.
The Ducks’ Josh Manson checked him near the boards, and Johansen came up gimpy, but he was back out there in due time.
In fact, he was healthy enough to cross-check Manson out of the play, just a few seconds before Filip Forsberg tied the game.
But Johansen was admitted to Vanderbilt Hospital Thursday night for “emergency surgery” to his thigh and will miss the rest of the playoffs. Not to claim any medical expertise, but that sounds very much like a blood clot.
Since veteran center Mike Fisher is also hurt, Nashville is calling all centers. Forsberg has played there, and Vernon Fiddler was expected to rejoin the lineup.
Anybody who thinks Nashville can’t overcome this isn’t paying attention. Pittsburgh is missing all kinds of key players, including, Justin Schultz, Bryan Rust and Patrick Hornqvist, It won Game 4 at Ottawa anyway.
If anything, it will inspire a very easily inspired club.
Someone in Nashville has created a “Captain Ryan Ellis” Twitter account, in which the Preds defenseman is dressed in Civil War garb and is identified as the “commanding officer of Fort Bridgestone.”
“Ellis” refers to the “gutless Colonel Perry” and to the “Disney Yankees.” After the injury, he wrote to “Mother” and said, “Lt. Johansen was wounded grievously in battle. A crushing defeat of our Anaheim enemy would be the only suitable outcome now..”
As for Lt. Manson, he said he didn’t really think Johansen should have been whistled for cross-checking, which put him in the minority of Ducks.
“You don’t like to see them call penalties like that in the last few seconds,” Manson said. “If that had happened to us I think we would have been really frustrated.
“The issue there was that they’d already called a lot of penalties on us in that period. Maybe if it’s three or four minutes left they should have called that one, but not that late.”
It’s the season of disagreement. If you don’t think so, you’re just a low-down DMV.
