Full of ignorance.
Can you imagine how dumb, or at least ignorant, you have to be to drill someone in the chin like that a good second after he releases the puck, see the guy helped off the ice by two teammates, and try to act as though you did not in fact do the thing you just did? If he thought he was fooling anyone, he's an idiot. If he thought he didn't hit Eriksson in the head, he is absurdly negligent and has no place in the league.
Was not a full second. ANY player acts like that when they're called for a penalty, especially a major.
On the other hand, maybe Scott really didn't know it was a headshot, and his brain does work about as well as he plays hockey. In that case, he is just a dangerous idiot, unaware of his own injurious capabilities. At least George had the common decency to take Lennie out to the pond and put him out of his misery. That the Sabres continue to not only pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars, but use him in the lineup just about every night, tells you all you need to know about the kind of malicious intent with which they enter every game.
Yes, because John Scott has a history of trying to injure players and delivering dirty hits. So clearly this is what the team expected.
The problem with suspending Scott is that this does nothing to hurt a team that apparently needs to have an entire library's worth of books thrown at it before it gets any kind of message.
If the examples for this are the Kaleta hit and the Scott hit, then the author is clueless.
(This goes without mentioning, by the way, that Scott is somehow not a repeat offender and likely won't catch as much in the way of a suspension as all that.)
Somehow..
because he's not a dirty player and doesn't throw dirty hits you bumbling excuse for a journalist.
Well when given the chance to talk about the incident, Scott predictably turtled, preferring instead to say nothing
This is common after a controversial incident. He did speak the next day. Why is this an issue? Grasping for straws is why.
Wednesday's incident, for instance, overshadowed the fact that Kevin Porter tried to board Torey Krug earlier in the game. If he had waited an extra half-stride, the crosscheck he put right between the numbers while the rookie defenseman was trying to retrieve the puck near the endboards would have resulted in a major penalty, rather than a minor, and likely a call from Brendan Shanahan.
That it didn't is only happenstance, and perhaps incompetence on Porter's part. I'd say you'll get 'em next time, kid, but the team just put you on waivers.
Criticizing something that didn't actually happen now and calling it "lucky"? Wow.
Kaleta's actions at any given moment of his career are highly likely to be inexcusable, probably even among his teammates, but he's still getting 10 minutes a night in Buffalo over the course of his unfortunate career.
Because beneath the dirty or questionable plays , he's a decent hockey player.
Again, Scott was out there in the final period of a two-goal game, and you don't send him over the boards with anything but malice. He might not have said, "Go take someone's head off, Johnny," but he didn't need to. That's implicit in putting him out there at all.
Scott didn't go hunting for a hit. The opportunity presented itself and he took it, whether or not it was a good decision. He didn't go out of his way.
This is true of Kaleta as well. Kaleta's role is to make sure everyone on the ice has their head on a swivel, and maybe thinks twice about turning to face the boards, because if they do, there's a good chance they're getting their faces mashed into them at 60 miles an hour.
Hyperbole is cool.
John Tortorella was suspended for a game in 2009 for squirting a fan with a water bottle, then throwing it into the stands, and really, this is so much worse.
This is worse? What? Ron Rolston playing a guy he literally had to because of other injuries? And letting him have his occassional shift, because Scott was actually having a decent game prior?
And that's the thing: These are the kinds of players the Sabres can roll at any time, and if this is going to be their response every time they're down a few goals in the third period, the other teams might just stop coming out of the dressing room so they don't get one of their best players killed.
More pathetic hyperbole.
And that's really all fanboy owner Terry Pegula cares about.
What does this even mean? Are other owners not fans of their team?
Remember all the proclamations when he first bought the team — no, not the ones about winning multiple Stanley Cups, although, haha — that he wasn't in this to make money? "If I want to make money, I'll go drill another natural gas well," and whatever else he said. Well, ticket prices went up between $1 and $4 for 2011-12, between $2 and $8 for the partially locked-out 2012-13 campaign, and an additional $1 to $4 this year.
As they have across the league. You know what also keeps going up? The team's spending on players, scouts, arena improvements, city projects, etc. Does the author expect Terry to just keep spending and not try to increase revenue? Typical naive view of how sports businesses work.
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This is truly an embarassing article. The few valid points he has are sandwiched by hyperbole, logically inconsistencies are very bad attempts to vilify the team.
