Re: 2009-2010 NHL Season Part 3: After The Gold Rush
And my point is - I don't see a ton of difference between the two hits. Yet a guy with no previous record gets 4 games, and the guy with a record of supplemental discipline (and a long list of questionable hits) gets 2. Makes no sense.
I took another look at the Ovechkin hit. Especially now that I've been able to see it a few times in a row at full speed, I can definately buy the argument that the two hits are very similar, as you say. By that thinking, you'd be right on. That is to say: the hits themselves are very similar. However, I think there's a major difference in the timing of the two hits- and to me that explains the difference in suspensions- moreso than Ovechkin's star power.
Lapierre's hit was considerably longer after the puck was played and much more deliberate than Ovechkin's. Nichol fires a shot from the hashes, and is casually turning at the red line when Lapierre gets him from behind. Lapierre can't for the life him come up with any sort of justification for that hit. There is absolutely deliberate intent behind that hit. It's worth mentioning again: Nichol shot from the hash marks, and was casually turning at the red line when Lapierre hit him.
Ovechkin's hit- while ultimately just as bad in terms of speed, body position and the fact that he pushed Campbell into the boards- can at least be disguised as finishing a hit on a forecheck. Make the slightest change of variables (Ovechkin delivers the hit .5 seconds earlier, or does it when Campbell is two feet closer to the boards, and doesn't have the space to really fall into them like he did), and you wouldn't be able to tell Ovechkin's hit from a normal finished forecheck. Of course, it still ends up being a CFB penalty at that point, but its otherwise a
lot more innocent and a lot more similar to the kinds of plays you see in every game.
Granted, Campbell
wasn't close enough to the boards so that he wouldn't fall into them, and Ovechkin
didn't deliver the check while Campbell had the puck- which is why he got the misconduct and the suspension in addition to his Boarding/CFB penalty. But even with that in mind, you can look at Ovechkin's hit and think that
maybe he was trying to do make a hockey play and he mistimed it. In my opinion, there's no way you can possibly do that with Lapierre's hit.
Does that explain it well enough, perhaps?
