But that was in the girly man days of the NHL, back when you could hold each other at will, hook each other at will, before their eternally exhaustive and perversely entertaining rules were tinkered with again and again and again
"Before the lockout, it was all-out rugby out there," said Mike Knuble, in his 12th NHL season. "The holding, and hooking - I don't know how anybody scored. It was just hard to get around the ice."
Now it's up and down, shots galore, hard contact at high speeds - and crashing the net. Over the last few days of these first-round playoffs, we have seen three playoff games determined by goals involving some sort of contact with goaltenders.
Four times goalies were bumped, pushed or plowed. Four times the goals were allowed to stand.
"I guess the beauty of our game," said Knuble, "is the ugliness of it."
Once, not so long ago, it was a no-no to even set foot in that blue area around the net. "One of the worst rules in hockey," league disciplinarian Colin Campbell wrote on NHL.com the other day of the foot-in-the-crease rule. Campbell, the man who introduced "slew foot" to the American vocabulary as the Rangers' coach during the Eric Lindros era, now heads up "The Situation Room" blog on NHL.com.
This thing is funnier than anything comedian Mike Myers could concoct. Campbell's comments alone are worth a subscription fee. Besides ragging on his league's old rules, Campbell describes Flyers forward Daniel Carcillo as a "repeat offender" and writes, after choosing not to suspend players involved in a game-ending scrum between Boston and Montreal the other night that: "You've got to let the games unfold. You've got to let hockey be hockey, playoffs be playoffs. You've got to let the energy flow.
"And then, when they cross that line, you do what you have to do."
Rightly so, Mr. Ricochet . . .
