1) I don't get how anyone can say that Kassian's slash is accidental? Do you think he was aiming for the glass with that wild swing? To me it looked like he was obviously swinging his arm and stick, fully extended, in Gagner's general direction and as dumb luck would have it, he made contact with the jaw.
If you wanna get all "real world example" about it, think about it like this. Give a guy a gun. He happens to be a terrible shot. He tries to shoot another guy. Does it really matter where the bullet ends up? What he is doing is terrible. If he happens to shoot the other guy in the face as opposed to the toe there is an obvious difference in the result but either way the crazy guy with the gun is in the wrong.
2) Kessel on the other hand hits a guy with his stick, deliberately. The Kessel lawyer is going to say "self defense" as a much larger guy was taking it upon himself to attack Kessel and Kessel was doing everything in his power to try to scare off the much larger guy. Kinda like if you are being attacked by a bear.
Now all I am saying is that this is my opinion after watching the video once and I seem to be the only one since no one else has said it. Kessel defended himself and he used his stick to spear and slash his attacker because he sure and heck wasn't going to go toe-to-toe in a fight with him.
I agree with calling Kessel a number of things. ie. Call him a chicken for not fighting Scott. But I really don't get the whole idea that Kessel was anything other than the defender in that situation and he happened to use the best tools he had in his hands to defend himself.
I definitely expect Kessel's punishment to be less than Kassian's based on who the aggressor was. Kassian attacked Gagner, Scott attacked Kessel. Personally, I'd bet on Kessel getting 0-1 games and Clarkson getting a suspension for jumping in.
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