The NHL must hate prosperity. After making a big splash in America following the wildly exciting Olympics (where we defended our national identity, no biggie) the NHL has followed with a nauseating few weeks.

I wasn’t really going to bring this up because I don’t like to dwell on these sorts of incidents and I've already criticized Ovechkin's style of play, but Barry Melrose was on PTI today and was an absolute troglodyte. He made hockey fans everywhere look like a group of brain-dead, gorilla juice-heads out for blood.

There were big expectations from the Bruins this year after two back-to-back surprising seasons. After posting a 35-41-6 season in 2006-2007 and being thoroughly lambasted by the media for dealing star-forward Joe Thornton to the Sharks the previous year, the Bruins finished with an unexpected 94 points. That was good enough to squeak into the playoffs as the eight seed. They even pushed a heavily favoured Montreal squad to seven games. Last year, the Bruins shocked many pundits by winning the Eastern Conference by a wide margin and narrowly missing the President’s Trophy by only one point. The Bruins were eventually ousted in the second round, but their young squad appeared set to contend with the elite teams in the Eastern Conference. It hasn’t exactly worked out that way so far this year. In fact, the Bruins sit tied for 9th in the East and just recently snapped a 10 game winless streak by beating the Canadiens in Montreal. So what’s wrong with the Bruins? What happened to last year’s powerhouse?