As someone who sees Milan Lucic's preposterously premeditated act of interference as only slightly more egregious than responding to any clean, hard bodycheck by dropping the gloves with an unwilling participant, I still think the NHL's Department of Player Safety should have made him sit a couple out in a luxury suite. The hit, in and of itself, wasn't all that bad relative to the one that it was in retaliation to...
However, as a matter of principle, I can't help but think that a league that's trying to discipline big dumb animalistic violence out of their game does itself a disservice by not coming down harder on a player that's built like a rhinoceros who lurked in the shadows of his eventual prey like a goddamn great white shark before mounting and pounding it like an enraged gorilla. Mathieu Joseph probably deserved to have his ass meet ice, and - since "developing" the scoring touch of a T-Rex - Milan Lucic basically only gets paid $6 million a year to make sure that it does. Still, I'm not sure how, in good conscience, I'm supposed to apply the "predatory" label to any hit if stalking someone the length of the rink with the laser-like focus of a wild feline is worthy of no more than the smallest of five-figure fines. I would say that it's a "no harm, no foul"-type situation, but at least a little bit of damage has been done to how the NHL designates and defines their most punishable acts of aggression, since a beast-like bullying apparently doesn't count as a predatory act. Probably would have been best for them to stay on-brand semantically, as Milan Lucic's absence from it only stood to enhance their product anyway.
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