Pittsburgh Sports, Opinion and Politics | Just Watch the Game Blog

This is not your typical hockey fight:

Serious injuries are rare in hockey fights. They usually look a lot worse than they are.

Jay Beagle found out the hard way last night that there’s always a chance that you’re going to lose consciousness and shed blood.

Beagle and the rest of the league also found out that it’s not a good idea to take cheap shots at the Penguins’ star players.

Beagle hit Kris Letang in the face and knocked his helmet off a few seconds before he was confronted by Asham.

When Beagle did that he also sent a message to the people who want to ban fighting in the NHL. He showed them what would happen to star players if there was no price to pay for the guys who take shots at them.

Sidney Crosby will be coming back soon.

I have a feeling that Asham is not going to have a lot of patience for anybody who decides to take a cheap shot at him.

What Asham did after the knockout was low class, but give him credit for saying so in the locker room after the game.

Meanwhile, Beagle should be glad it was Asham he ran into last night instead of Steve McIntyre, the Penguins official star protector.

He’s 6’5″, 250.

Sidney Crosby wore a black helmet at the morning skate today.

So did every other player on the ice.

That could very well mean that he has been cleared for contact.

Geno Malkin skated this morning, which could mean that he’ll play tonight against the Capitals.

Tonight’s game is a good one for people who say that they don’t watch meaningless games in October.

Under normal circumstances –injuries aside –this would be a game involving three of the five (when healthy) best players in the world.

Why would any sports fan consider having the option to watch that a bad thing?

Now, in between Steelers, Pitt and West Virginia football games, we will be able to do more than talk about games.

Tonight we can start watching hockey games that count.

The Penguins in Vancouver is a late start but it’s also a pretty good one and it could be a Stanley Cup Final preview.

Versus makes it a doubleheader with the Flyers and the Bruins, which could be an Eastern Conference Final preview. It’s also Jaromir Jagr’s first game as a Flyer.

The man to watch in the early part of the season is Brendan Shanahan. He’s the NHL’s new Prefect of Discipline and he showed in the preseason that he’s not going to have any patience for illegal hits to the head.

I have a feeling that, before the month is out, we’re going to be reminded of what we missed when the Penguins had to play a third of the season without Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.

Drop the puck.

It’s hard to believe that the Penguins will be playing a hockey game Wednesday night.

They don’t wait long in the NHL before they start playing exhibition games- training camp starts Saturday.

The best thing about hockey season beginning is that there will be even less focus on the pathetic, aggravating, stinking Pirates.

There will also be real games to watch in about in three weeks.

The Penguins will be a legitimate Stanley Cup contender with or without Sidney Crosby.

Here’s a a nice capsulized look at what each NHL team is dealing with going into training camp.

ESPN.com started its training camp tour in Pittsburgh.

Be sure to check out my show from noon to 2, Mon-Fri on TribLive Radio. I’ll have plenty of hockey experts on all season long, including some of the top NHL.com, ESPN, Versus/NBC and TSN analysts.

I think you’ll find it more interesting than listening to what Steve from McKeesport thinks on The Fan.

Donald Fehr is the Executive Director of the NHL Players Association. The NHL CBA expires one year from yesterday.

The NHL has a salary cap. It also has an owner in Detroit who says he hates the cap because it prevents him from spending as much as he wants.

If you liked how things were going for the Penguins before the lockout and the introduction of the salary cap, you’ll love this quote from Fehr:

“The debate at the table is hopefully going to be driven by numbers and it’s not going to be driven by philosophy,” Fehr said. “Having said that, the league with far and away the most stability and the least problems is baseball, and that’s true since ’94. It’s the only one with no cap.”

If there is no salary cap in the NHL, the Penguins become the Pirates.

And it’s pretty obvious that the players love Donald Fehr.

UPDATE

I think anybody interested in Sidney Crosby playing hockey again had to come away from the press conference today feeling pretty optimistic. Both doctors insisted that they expect him to make a full recovery and not be any moor likely to have another serious concussion.

That, of course, is dependent upon keeping him out until he is 100% recovered, which they say he is not at this point.

Crosby immediately dismissed the notion that he might never play again and he said he is 100% likely to play this season.

Unfortunately, there was not one question about the role of the equipment in NHL injuries.

UPDATE

I’ll be doing my talk show on TribLive Radio when Sidney Crosby meets with the media for the first time since April 29th.

I hope one of my friends in the media asks him if it’s time to talk seriously about reducing the size and texture of hockey equipment.

Listen to what Don Cherry said when he saw the replay of David Steckel’s hit on Crosby back on January 1st.

It’s time for the NHL and the NFL to start focusing less on what the penalties should be after a guy delivers a blow to the head and more on making those blows to the head less damaging.

In a recent column I quoted a rugby blogger named Cdano on his feeling about head injuries in the NHL. I don’t know who the guy is, but he makes more sense on the issue than any of the so called experts I’ve heard.

“One of the prime reasons can be found in the fact that hockey equipment is looking more and more like football gear.”     “Here’s my personal injury record in contact sports: Twelve years playing rugby. Injuries: One hamstring injury not related to contact.”

“Three years of football. Injuries: Bone spur removal as a result of continuous impact with plastic fore arm protection of the opposition. Cartilage damage as a result of human projectile hitting knee with hard plastic protection.”

Cdano goes on to say that the collisions in rugby are meat on meat and the collisions in hockey and football are meat on plastic and that rugby players play with an innate sense of vulnerability while football and hockey players, because of all that hard plastic, play with an innate sense of invulnerability.

Maybe it’s time to start making football and hockey players feel a little more like rugby players.

Now take a look at the size of the shoulder pads on these old timers.

Get used to stories like this one.

CTV News in Canada is citing seven sources who say that Sidney Crosby’s symptoms have returned and he is unlikely to be ready for training camp.

We’ll have to sort through stories like this right up until the first time he takes a hard check.

Who knows when (if?) that will be.

*** UPDATE ***

Guy Junker told me this morning that he contacted the reporter from CTV who did the story and was told that he was basing his speculation mostly on the fact that Crosby had cancelled his ice time at a local arena.

Guy didn’t think the story was worth reporting after speaking with the reporter.

The Trib reported a little while ago that Mario Lemieux and Dan Bylsma are cautiously optimistic.

I spend a lot of time in Canada and what everyone in Pittsburgh needs to understand is that Crosby is 10 times bigger in Canada than he is here.

This is a slow time of year up there and they’re getting the hockey itch. Any decent hockey story has the potential to be blown way out of proportion.

That may very well be the case here. This won’t be the last story like this that you hear.

We’ll know soon enough if he’s going to be ready for camp.