Comment: Connor McDavid got what he deserved

Edmonton The Oilers decided to publish a press release the night before Wednesday, Finnish time, in which they took a stand Connor McDavidin to a three-game suspension.

“The Oilers organization is disappointed. We share the fans’ frustration For Connor McDavid suspended. We will support him during the process,” the Oilers said in a terse statement.

Edmonton is trying to make a point out of a stick, and the statement even looks a little embarrassing.

McDavid has to watch from the sidelines only three games of the 82-match regular season, even though he hit an opponent in the head with a cross stick. Discipline did not treat the world’s best puck player was not treated unfairly, contrary to what Edmonton is trying to convey.

Grumbling and whining about McDavid’s suspension has gotten ridiculously over the top. It feels like all of hockey Canada, and especially Edmonton, has been hit on the head with a stick when the superstar was suspended.

McDavid is the best player in the world, but he too has to play by the rules. If you hit an opponent in the chin with a cross stick, you deserve to be beaten.

Many experts in the Canadian hockey media who have commented on the matter have said that the suspension should not have been so severe, because the victim of McDavid’s outrageous trick Conor Garland would have deserved two minutes for holding on. He kept McDavid out of the game just as Edmonton was looking for an equalizer in the dying moments of the game.

I have followed the conversation in amazement. The referees didn’t raise their hands to signal a freeze, but that doesn’t give McDavid the right to use his bat as a striking weapon.

”McDavid took the law into his own hands”. This is the kind of narrative the Oilers players and part of the Canadian hockey media are now trying to paint.

“McDavid has to defend himself,” an experienced teammate of the superstar Corey Perry quoth.

He pointed to the fact that McDavid has rarely caused opponents to freeze this season. Usually, he is the most fouled player in the entire league, or at least at the very top, but this season, McDavid is not even among the 40 most fouled players in terms of ices caused to opponents.

Perry may be right that referees overlook fouls on McDavid too easily because the best hockey player in the world holds the puck so much.

However, that does not entitle McDavid to hit the opponent with a club or an elbow to the head. McDavid already got away without a suspension last week after beating the Minnesota Wild Marcus Johanssonia rudely elbowed the dome so that he got a concussion.

Such tricks are not self-protection but acts of frustration and punishment.

Edmonton’s other superstar Leon Draisaitlkin criticized the NHL for McDavid’s suspension.

“We don’t think it’s important that the league’s best players perform on the ice,” he said.

The NHL certainly wants McDavid to play as much as possible, but it would be silly if deserved bans were not handed out with this excuse.

Superstar Cult is still going strong in the NHL, but it’s still backwards to think that McDavid is above the rules.

It’s only good that the NHL disciplinary team tries to eradicate the scumbags from the NHL ice by imposing severe suspensions.

The discipline of the series has received a lot of flak from its light bans in recent years, but this season it has sent a couple of strong messages. First it went down with a bang Matt Rempelle no less than eight game suspensions Miro Heiskanen from teloma, and now it dared to drop a hefty three-match ban on McDavid by the standards of the NHL.

Besides, the Oilers might even benefit from McDavid’s ban in the end, because after such a loud complaint, the referee’s whistle is guaranteed to sound more sensitively when the world’s best puck player is violated.