from Eric Duhatschek of the Globe and Mail,
Up until (John) Scott went predictably postal, the NHL had played 105 exhibition games and 119 regular-season games without a suspension for supplementary discipline, the longest stretch in the player-safety-department era.
Consider that last year there were seven suspensions in the exhibition season alone (totalling 38 games) and nine more for another 42 games up to and including Nov. 1. Some of the offences were particularly memorable and egregious.
Scott, for example, received seven games for a brutal elbow to the head of the Boston Bruins’ Loui Eriksson; the Buffalo Sabres’ Patrick Kaleta got 10 for a dangerous hit to the head of the Columbus Blue Jackets’ Jack Johnson. It was nasty stuff – and didn’t even include a trio of five-game sentences handed out to Maxim Lapierre for boarding Dan Boyle, Ryan Garbutt for charging Dustin Penner and Cody McLeod for boarding Niklas Kronwall. None of those was pretty either.
In short, a year-over-year comparison shows that suspensions are way down – 16 handed out by Nov. 1 of last year compared to just three this year (to Scott, the New York Rangers’ John Moore and the Vancouver Canucks’ Alex Burrows). Of course, there have been three more since the start of the month – Ference, plus two games for the Los Angeles Kings’ Jordan Nolan and four for the Nashville Predators’ Anton Volchenkov.
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