05-04-2021, 10:04 AMTommySalami Wrote: Feel free to disagree with my analysis, but watch the videos without any bias towards Wilson. I think he's a POS when he goes head hunting but this is no where near a lifetime/season suspension IMO. Although the league may give one because they feel pressured.

This is coming from someone who has no affiliation to the caps whatsoever but watch the replays and angles and this isn't as bad as it looks at all.

1. At first I thought this was Tom Wilson cross checking buchnevich in the back of the neck/head which I think many people also thought. If you watch the replay it's clear Wilson's stick is underneath buchnevich, not on top.

Now when you look at the reverse angle and know Wilson's stick is not driving his head into the ice, both of his hands are come down beside Buchnevich's head not on top of it. It looks bad but it's two guys being physical and I didn't see much cheap about the way Wilson came down on Buchnevich

2. The punch - He punches him in the shoulder/back. I'm sorry but that kind of thing happens all the time in scrums. It's not nice but it's not anything to be throwing suspensions around

3. The Panarin incident. Once again, not nice but Panarin came in to defend his teammate and literally jumped on Wilson's back. At that point he's committed to an altercation with Wilson and Wilson straight overpowered him. Hair pulling is dirty but it's not lifetime suspension dirty.

I think the people calling for the lifetime suspensions are looking at this from the angle of Tom Wilson's history and the other options available. This isn't "Oh, Player X got his stick stuck under a guy in a scrum, took a cheap shot, and then got jumped by another guy and fought him off", this is "Tom Wilson, who has been penalized and suspended for headhunting behaviors many times before, got his stick stuck under a guy who he punched in the junction of the neck and shoulder, before he got jumped by another guy, whom he responded to by picking him up by the hair and throwing him to the ice". There are plenty of other scrums where somebody falls on a stick and the response is not to punch them near the head or lay on them with their face in the ice. There are plenty of other fights where nobody gets picked up by the hair, even when they've got some flow.

The reason people are calling for a ban from the NHL isn't because of this incident alone. In a time where we're becoming more and more aware of the dangers of hitting somebody in the head as a society, this guy is out there actively targeting players' heads. Panarin very nearly landed on his head or his neck. A few inches wrong, a second too late, and this is a very different conversation. These calls for a ban are based around the question of "Where is the line?". Where is the line for when someone has been consistently enough of a danger to other players that he is no longer welcome to make millions of dollars to be a danger to people? How many times is somebody going to be allowed opportunity to clean up their act and be better before we accept the possibility that maybe they can't and/or won't do that? Should a player be allowed to injure another player, only to go off to the box and posture about it like they've just done something praiseworthy? 

Ultimately, I think this is a problem that will be blown a bit out of proportion compared to if it were another player who did this because the odds of it being another player doing this are so low. Meanwhile, there's a sort of feeling that "Oh, Tom Wilson's back on his bullshit again." Like, if this is his bullshit, there's a problem here.