Last night the Edmonton Oilers lost 5-2 to the LA Kings. That isn’t news. The Oilers are a young team trying to learn how to compete in a tough Western Conference while trying to forge an identity and consistency. They are second last in the NHL - tied with the New York Islanders - but there is hope on the horizon in the form of young blue-chip prospects like Jordan Eberle, Magnus Paajarvi, and Taylor Hall. The latter of which had his bell rung last night.

It’s almost funny how poorly the NHL’s image has suffered since the Olympics. It didn’t even take a day after I posted about Ovechkin and Cooke for another player to violently injure an opponent. James Wisniewski (not Andy Wozniewski, he sucks even worse), a defenceman for the Anaheim Ducks, raced in from the blueline to deliver a retaliatory check on Chicago Olympian Brent Seabrook. Earlier in the play Seabrook laid out Corey Perry in what maybe should have been a penalty, maybe not. Hard to say really. It certainly wasn’t anything to lose your mind over. The refs didn’t call anything, so Wisniewski took matters into his own hands. Seabrook didn’t have the puck. In fact, the player he passed to had enough time to pass the puck. Seabrook was unsuspecting. To compound the matter, Wisniewski leapt from his feet and launched Seabrook into the boards from a few feet away. Seabrook was out before he hit the ground. It was sickening.

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.