We love Tom Pyatt and all, but putting him on line 1A with Gomez and Gionta for three straight games? When the Yotes were in town on Monday, both Tom and big brother Taylor played as top-six forwards - likely not something their folks, who took in the game, would have expected to see when Pyatt the younger was acquired by Montreal as a throw-in in the Gomez trade. Pyatt the elder, who got all the size where his bro got all the speed, said before the game that playing summer hockey in Thunder Bay surely helped his kid brother along (some of the other players: Patrick Sharp, the four Staal brothers, Ryan Johnson). On Monday, Pyatt saw plenty of time on the third and fourth lines as the game wore on, but then everyone knew he was never going to be more than a band-aid. Goodness knows French Immersion has no trouble with tinkering of all sorts, but it would be nice if some fairness were injected into the equation - even though that would likely mean a long pressbox stretch for our boy Jaro Spacek.
- Life isn't, of course, fair. If it were, people might have to answer for doltish tweets like the one sent out by a certain L.A.-based player agent at roughly this point last year. But then, Carey Price's co-league leading five wins - it took him until Nov. 17 to reach the mark last season - aren't of any use in dragging him down, are they?
- Discrimination is the foulest form of unfairness, so good news, then, that former NHLer Bob Sirois has translated his breathless tome about anti-French bias in the NHL into English. We wrote about this at great, massive, boring length last year, when the original French-language version came out (speaking of which, why change the Anglo bull facing off with the Franco frog cover illustration?) so we won't be revisiting it today.
- And to beat our fairness meme to a bloody pulp, we close with a quick word on Price's cousin, Phoenix captain Shane Doan. It's been a fall of discontent what with the litigation, the notoriety (stop us before we go into an Ogilthorpe riff!).
Doan missed Monday's tilt because he's still serving a three-game suspension for a questionable hit in Anaheim - it's the first suspension of his career - and reflected on the recent out-of-court settlement in a defamation lawsuit pitting him and former federal sports minister Denis Coderre.
For those who have forgotten, it's a long and boring tale about whether or not Doan insulted four French-speaking refs in a loss against the Habs five years ago ("f---ing Frenchmen" was the charming phrase at issue, it appears the evil-doer may have been former Yote Ladislav Nagy.) Doan insists he can remember saying nothing disrespectful at all, that the worst he did was to point out that a poor night's officiating was to be expected in Montreal in a game reffed by "four French guys". Doan doesn't swear, ever, so the allegations all seemed a little out of character.
The issue clearly still rankles ("I wasn't even mad, I was just trying to calm (goalie Curtis Joseph) down!" said Doan, adding "If we'd been in Toronto I'd have said 'four easterners' if I'd been in Calgary I'd have said 'four westerners'. What I was saying was 'homers'.) "I'm from a small town in Alberta and I'm used to things being done in a certain way," he said. "And when they're not done in that way . . ."
Let us finish the thought for you, Shane: it all goes off the rails.
