Hockey
Does Bergeron deserve a spot on the Canadian Olympic Hockey team? Absolutely. He's a terrific two-way forward who will help them offensively, defensively and on the penalty kill. A player like Bergeron, at full health, is the type of player every team dreams about. If I were Canada, I would put him on a line with Sidney Crosby because he and Crosby were masterful in the 2005 World Juniors.I find myself in agreement. All-star squads exist to show off at the all-star game. Olympic Hockey is a very different game from the NHL. The wider surface requires quickness and plenty of skill managing the transition from offense to defense. Bergeron's ability to play well at both ends of the rink does more to help Team Canada to victory int he tournament than adding another scorer would. To me that's the difference. As fun as the flashy players are, grinders mucking in the corners and hustling on the backcheck is just as important as playing aggressively on the forecheck. no comments
Kevin Vahey, one of my well-traveled acquaintances, was kind enough to send along this story recalling the famous fighting Bruins, who climbed into the stands to battle Rangers fans in Madison Square Garden.
O'Reilly insisted that he had entered the stands merely to "detain" Kaptain.
"There was no way he was going to strike one of my teammates and steal his stick, wield it like a weapon and then disappear into the crowd and go to a local bar with a souvenir and a great story," O'Reilly said. "As soon as I got him into a bearhug, I felt like I was being pummeled by multiple people. All I could do was cover up."
Cherry had a different recollection. "Never in my life did I see Terry O'Reilly covering up during a fight," he said.
Kaptain managed to break free of O'Reilly but was corralled several rows up by McNab and Milbury, who pinned him across a seat.
"I grabbed his shoe, took a little tug on it, and then sort of double pumped," Milbury said. "I don't know if I hesitated for a minute because I thought I'd be vilified for the next 30 years, but I gave him a cuff across the leg, and then I did what I thought was probably the most egregious thing of all: I threw his shoe on the ice."
Eighteen Bruins went into the stands. Milbury said, "If you watch the tape - and I can freely throw my teammates under the bus now after 30 years - people were throwing some serious shots down below us that were obscured by the fact that everybody was focusing on the idiot highest up in the stands hitting somebody with a shoe."
And yes, Milbury was wailing on the man with his own shoe. In most instances, Basketball tried initiatives to bring players and fans together first, then Hockey copied. In this case, Hockey's big in the stands brawl pre-dated basketball's by nearly two decades.
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