Miikka Kiprusoff – at the centre of a storm these past few days after a Vancouver Canucks’ fan directed a laser pointer at him in a game last weekend – admitted Tuesday he wasn’t aware of what was happening in the game until after it was brought to his attention by his teammates.
“I saw after the game on TV what happened,” said Kiprusoff, “but during the game, I didn’t notice it. I heard our players saying something about it; I didn’t have any clue what they were talking about.”
The issue came up in the aftermath of Saturday night’s Hockey Night In Canada clash between the Canucks and Kiprusoff’s Calgary Flames, when an unidentified fan, sitting in the general area of the bench, tried to distract Kiprusoff with a green laser point, directed towards his eyes. Television replays show that the light flickered off his mask, but Kiprusoff said it never got directly into his eyes.
“I always close my eyes when they shoot anyway,” quipped Kiprusoff, who added, in a more serious moment: “That’s not cool. You don’t do that, but when there’s that many people in the stands, sometimes there are a few dummy ones in there too. It’s a challenge to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
GM Place will be the venue for men’s hockey during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Does that make apprehending the culprit even more important, given that partisanship can ramp up even further in a gold-medal game as opposed to a regular-season NHL match? Kiprusoff will represent Finland in the competition; presumably, he doesn’t want a repeat of the incident, if he ever happened to be playing in the gold-medal game against Canada.
“I believe Canadian fans are classier than that,” said Kiprusoff. “It was just one guy doing that. I don’t think there’s not many going to do that anyways.
“I trust those fans.”
