from Steve Buffery of the Toronto Sun,

If Phil Kessel’s dogging it, which does happen from time to time, O’Neill will go after him. It’s refreshing.

“He never works hard enough,” said O’Neill, when the topic of Kessel is brought up. “It’s my job to watch and talk about it and if the effort’s horrible, then the effort’s horrible. I don’t make it up. I don’t know Phil Kessel. Apparently he likes fishing and he likes playing cards. And I love that s--t. So I’d probably like playing that with him. But when I watch him on the ice, he does a lot of things that I don’t like.”

In particular, Kessel’s lack of effort when he’s not scoring or when the club is in a slump, as it is right now (a profound understatement).

But the irony is — and NHL fans and O’Neill followers will jump all over this — that O’Neill himself was sometimes knocked as a player for his occasional Kessel-like qualities — a gifted goal scorer who wasn’t (or so it would seem) always in the very best of shape.

But the Etobicoke resident admits as much and tells a story about how he spent a summer training with Roberts, a fitness guru and good friend. They were doing sled sprints (with weights) on a baseball field in Muskoka. After some very tough sledding, O’Neill started puking.

“(Roberts) just looked at me and said, ‘What did you do last night?’ And I said, ‘None of your business.’ And he goes, ‘Whatever you did, you can’t do it again if you want to do the sleds, because you can’t f---ing do it.

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