Sid Strikes Gold

Congratulations to Sidney and the rest of the Canadian team for winning the gold medal. it was bitter sweet watching Crosby score in OT yesterday afternoon to beat the USA team, Or as a guy I saw on tv yesterday put it "watching Sid score the OT winner was kind of like watching your mother in law drive over a cliff in your new Cadillac".

So what did we learn from watching the Olympics this year:

1. An Olympic gold metal means as much to NHL players as winning the Stanley Cup. I was amazed to see how physical everyone was in this tournament, and shocked to see how upset the USA players were when they lost the game.

2. The NHL need to keep fighting. For a long time I really had no opinion on whether or not the NHL should get rid of fighting, but after watching the Olympics I think it is necessary that the NHL keeps it. I know this sounds funny but the game is played much cleaner when there is fighting involved. In the Olympics we saw a lot of cheap shots that would have never happened if the player throwing them thought they would have to stand up and fight after they did what they did. A couple examples of this were Semin Hitting Boyle from behind (completely out of character for him) and then Boyle chasing him down and slew footing him to the ice (which is more dangerous to a players health than being in a fight). If this was an NHL game Semin wouldn't have made that hit and if he did Boyle of one of his tea teammates would have dropped the gloves and beat him senseless.
Here is a list of other things I saw that wouldn't have happened if fighting was allowed:
1. Jack Johnson hits a Canadian player well after the horn sounded to end the period.
2. there was a delayed penalty called so Mike Richards decided rather than just touching the puck to get the whistle that he would fire it into the USA bench.
3. A USA player slashed Luongo in the hand behind the net.
4. There were numerous hits from behind.

These are only a few of the things that I saw that would never happen in the NHL. The one thing we did see because there was no fighting that i did like was star players were able to be hit cleanly without the hitter being instantly engaged by the star players teammates.