No, Tom Wilson isn’t the Caps only fighter, but he’s pissed, nonetheless. (Caps Outsider)
There’s a longstanding code in hockey that if you injure a guy, you answer for it. Take the next fight. Get it over with. Move on.
If you think I’m only talking about Matt Rempe injuring Trevor van Riemsdyk on Friday on a check that clearly hit his head, I’m not. I’m talking about countless other hits over the last century of professional hockey where a player was injured, and the player who hurt the guy ended up fighting. It doesn’t matter the circumstances beyond that. There’s a code. This happened recently when Nick Jensen got knocked out, exited the game on a stretcher, and Nic Dowd fought Tampa Bay’s Michael Eyssimont, who delivered the hit. That’s how it works, and Dowd said as much.
Back to Rempe. He clearly hit the head of van Riemsdyk, but that’s apparently ‘clean’ according to many Rangers fans who are incapable of being impartial. Later in the game, he declined a fight with Tom Wilson, though it would have been to the Rangers’ advantage for a fourth liner to take out a top forward for five minutes.
Look, I get it. You want to defend your player. I have taken second looks at Wilson’s antics and thought ‘but he didn’t mean to…’ or whatever. But that’s not the point.
The Caps have lost several players recently to head shots, including TVR, Jensen, and, briefly, T.J. Oshie, who admitted that he didn’t mind the hit that temporarily removed him from a game recently. When your season is over and the guy who laid you out merely gets a 2-minute minor for interference, or worse, nothing, that guy needs to answer for what he did. If not, why not just keep it up? Concuss the entire team! Their power play sucks, anyway, so elbows up!
Assuming the department of player safety decides, ‘he didn’t mean to’ or whatever, there’s no reason to stop until you lift the Stanley Cup. It worked for the Broad Street Bullies, right?
It doesn’t matter if it’s a Washington Capitals player, a New York Ranger, or a beer leaguer, injuring opponents is the cheapest way of playing the game. And if you’re going to keep that up, then decline the fight, you might end up like Donald Brashear, who hurt his opponents, then declined to answer for it, only for Marty McSorley to take revenge in a different way. In this case, and others like it, dropping the gloves would have been the smarter choice.
Unfortunately, too many New York Rangers fans, who enjoyed a Presidents’ Trophy the season with a head-hunting punk on the fourth line, don’t understand the code, not to mention their inability to see a clear headshot by anyone in blue.
That said, this isn’t about who wins or who loses, whether the hit was ‘clean’ – whatever that means these days – or a blatant penalty. If you injure a guy, especially if you’ve got a reputation for that sort of thing, answer for it. That’s the code.
