Let me start by saying that I'm neither surprised nor offended that Brad Marchand isn't being suspended for the sucker punch he delivered to the back of the otherwise unaware head of Scott Harrington. It was scummy. It was dirty. It was calculated (albeit by the mind of a moron). It was to a vulnerable part of the body that the NHL insists they are being more cautious in protecting. What it wasn't was overly violent in a way that makes me view letting him off the hook to be as inexcusable an act as the insanely unnecessary incident itself. That being said, considering the source of controversy, should that last part even have to be true for supplementary discipline to be on the table anymore? Brad Marchand wearing the fucking crown as 'Most Repetitive Offender' means the scale on which we judge his stupidity is weighted heavily relative to the one on which we judge the inherent uptick in physicality during the postseason. Him being suspended NINE times, and narrowly avoiding a handful of other suspensions due presumably to the league being too sick of seeing his unsightly snout to fully review the tape, means precedent doesn't need to be followed in disciplining a relatively run-of-the-mill rabbit punch. Admittedly, a relatively run-of-the-mill rabbit punch was all it was and no one should even feel the need to exaggerate that reality in making it sound worse than that. I say that because the name of the gutless prick who snuck behind an unknowing opponent like he was about to perform an ISIS-style execution being as tarnished as the horseshoe he has up his ass already makes it worse than that. The ice Brad Marchand skates on has long been understood, by everyone other than him apparently, to be about 100x thinner than that of the average NHL player. Therefore, I personally think he did enough to crack it based solely on the sheer stupidity of a guy whose most recent act of unrelenting idiocy was the equivalent of marching across the deepest of frozen pond once the thermometer hits 45 degrees fahrenheit. Let's put it this way, if the NHL's Department of Player Safety is the equivalent of a high school principal then Brad Marchand is the rebellious detention dweller who "accidentally" knocks the coffee out of hand while walking down the hall once a week. At this point, he should just be heavy-handedly punished based on the negative amount of benefit of the doubt that he's due. The hammer shouldn't be brought down in the name of Player Safety. It should be brought down in the name of player intelligence, as Brad Marchand is clearly not anywhere near smart enough to stay out of the type of trouble that puts the health of others at risk. If the best defense against him being suspended is that the Stanley Cup Playoffs are a hard fought grind that's meant only for the toughest of the tough then, ironically, he should be suspended for being a weak-willed coward in scurrying away from any retaliatory danger like the rodent he is. We're at a point where Brad Marchand is actively and intentionally going laughably out of his way to let everyone affiliated with the league that employs him know that he somehow still hasn't learned his lesson. Therefore, said league shouldn't even need a good, by-the-book reason to sentence him to a luxury suite, and it took me all of five minutes to think of plenty of mediocre reasons why he fled far enough from the framework of a physical sport to cost himself the privilege of playing in the next postseason game. Again, I can certainly understand those reasons not being good enough for Bruins' fans and/or the NHL's Department of Player Safety, but how about this one?
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