Canucks v. ‘Hawks: Ben Eager and Other Boobs

Given my anxiety about this series, the Canucks and ‘Hawks seem to me like a 7 episode (hopefully less) arc of that old show Fear Factor. Fortunately, in the first episode it was guys like Matt Walker and Cam Barker who were forced to sit down in a vat of writhing spiders while trying unsuccessfully to suck the blood out of snakes, with about a minute left in the third period. A very happy ending, indeed. But now it’s game 2 and Ben Eager wants the Canucks to do something really, really stupid to end up in similarly dire hell-hole. Towards that end, he came up with this: “If there’s a hit like that I’m going to take it again.” To be fair, Eager said a lot of things prior to that quote above—and some of those things might even have been reasonable observations about that hit he laid on Rick Rypien in game #1, from his point of view—but we don’t have time for reasonable arguments here. Through the magic of selective editing, the bottom line is that Eager would like the ...