By now I am sure you have seen the incident, if you have not the video is here, in which following a fight against Derek Boogaard of the New York Rangers, Matt Carkner flicked blook at the Rangers bench and the NHL has decided that is totally fine as Carkner was not suspended and is playing as I write this against the New Jersey Devils this evening. How this action is seen as less heinous than the throat-slash or the simulation of sex act is beyond me and just shows how big a joke the NHL suspension policy truly has becomes. The justification for those suspensions was that it was a violation of the obscene gesture rule, well what would you call flicking blood at someone; gentlemanly conduct? As I said last night it is not clear from the video that he actually flicked blood or not nor if it hit any Rangers and Carkner denied that he did following the game but none of that matters as to whether the act should have merited a suspension. The differential should have been in the severity not condoning a player for doing some utterly disgraceful. The NHL wonders why it cannot clean up the conduct in the game and the real reason is they have zero consistency in the ways in which they enforce their rules. A hit by one person is a suspension while if done by another it is not. It truly is a lottery system and this time Matt Carkner came up a winner and fans of the sport came up snake eyes.
