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Published April 3, 2010 Topping The List Of Things That Were Wrong About Thursday...Hockey is a huge deal in Canada. Hockey is to Canada what steroid-free baseball used to be to the United States. So, how is it that the biggest freaking idiots in the sport of hockey… have an office in Toronto? I’m not talking about Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke. Not high on my list, though. Nor am I talking about Gary Bettman. Yet. I’m talking about the idiots who wield the power to take away goals that are earned, and award goals that are not. Of course, Blue Jackets fans need not ask the reason why these so-called officials are so maligned. The Blue Jackets have been on the bad end of such calls probably three out of every four times, maybe more. So CBJ fans have plenty of reason to hate the goal “judges.” The latest, of course, is last night’s little soccer shot (it’s about 4:20 in) by career-ending sucker-puncher Todd Bertuzzi that would eventually prove to be the winning goal in Thursday night’s 3-2 loss. Yes, it certainly sucks that it was the winning goal. It sucks that a game has to be decided by something that controversial. It also sucks that the Jackets seemed to shake it off all too late to pull out a win. It sucks that teams have to kill power plays based on B.S. penalties, and to have to bounce back from B.S. goals. It really sucks to think that the lead sentence in a Detroit Free Press story on the game mentions that Bertuzzi looked more like a volleyball or soccer player on the ice at times. But that’s hockey… you kind of have to chalk it up to “it happens.” Bertuzzi certainly chalked it up that way. That whole “Every once in a while you get lucky bounces” crap he fed The Freep was classic. Sure, if you watch the replay, I suppose it could go either way, as to whether it was a definitive kicking motion. He shot his arms up in celebration awfully quickly, though. And protested when the ref immediately waved off the “goal.” He saw the puck coming at him and saw it go in, and it was an obvious redirection. The thing that sucks the worst of all (at least to some fans, anyway) is that such a controversial goal was scored by Todd Bertuzzi. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that he is a Detroit Red Wing. It’s not that he is a bad person (although he has shown very little evidence to the contrary). For me, it is that Todd Bertuzzi is on the ice at all. It is the fact that fortune somehow continues to smile on Todd Bertuzzi. He sat out a total of 20 games for a sucker-punch from behind on Steve Moore six years ago, riding him face-first into the ice and, among other things, fracturing bones in his neck, causing a grade three concussion and making it so he would never play hockey again. I’ve been on this soapbox before, so the quick summary is that his punishment did not fit the crime. It rarely does in today’s NHL. Unfortunately, he’s there, and there’s nothing fans can do about it, because Gary Bettman is the idiot in Toronto that reinstated him. Every goal Todd Bertuzzi has earned since his reinstatement is a slap in the face to Steve Moore and to decency and sportsmanship in hockey. That’s bad enough. The goal he doesn't earn…? That just hurts.
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