Once again in less than a week the Calgary Flames stole a win from the Edmonton Oilers.  The Oilers having played well for a total of 118 minutes through both games blew them both in the final minute.  Saturday it was the goaltender making a silly play on a puck.

Last night the Oilers lost in a shoot out 5-4.  However the Oilers had a 3-2 lead with 1.5 seconds left when the Flames tied the game sending to the eventual shoot out.

However, few people were talking about the way the team lost.

The focus of much of the ire of the fans and Coaches was on one play.

Jerome Iginla led defenseman Sheldon Souray into the boards face first on dump in by the Flames in the second period with the Oilers up 2-0.    The play looked bad and no matter whether one believes it was on purpose there is no doubt that Iginla made a bad mistake.

This may not sit well with Calgary fans but their captain should have done a better job with easing up on the play and making sure he knew where his stick was.  The mad rush combined with the stick between Souray’s feet at full speed was a sure fire disaster waiting to happen.

The fact that both players were beat up on the play, Souray taking the worst of it, does not excuse the Flames captain from making a very dangerous play.  One could argue about whether it was dirty but one cannot argue that it was dangerous and foolish thing to do.

Pat Quinn furious about the injury, which left Souray with a slight concussion and leaking some blood from his nose, expressed his opinion quite clearly.  He felt that it was dirty and that the culprit in the past would have found a stick to his head after that.

It did not take long for the NHL to react to those comments fining Quinn $10,000.

Iginla said he had not meant to do what happened and that he had not realized that his stick had tripped Souray.  Nonetheless these incidents happen enough that the NHL will have to consider suspensions for plays like these.

If they don’t then as Quinn stated it may force teams to consider vigilante justice to correct the problem.   Hits from behind are banned in all minor leagues and it needs to be considered at the Junior and NHL levels.  Souray was effectively defenceless as he was rammed into the boards and was lucky it was not worse than that.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.