Quote:
Originally Posted by powderjunkie
These Wideman incident threads are so insane.
It was a freak scenario. How often is a player returning to his own bench from his defending zone (long change at that) while the rush is coming back towards him from the far end? Pretty much never.
Wideman's actions in the seconds preceding and following the collision in no way support an 'angry' theory. Unless you think calling for a change with your stick and weakly "slamming" (for lack of a better word) it back on the ice, then gliding on one foot for 2 seconds before the collision is what an angry guy would do. Autopilot motion of raising your stick to be vertical in one hand so you can get off the ice, just like you've done a million other times in your career. In the midst of this motion, the 'freak accident' part comes into play - on ice participants aren't normally skating back in your direction as you're about to step off the ice.
But then we see Dennis really wind up and clock him, like an angry guy, right? It looks unlike just about any 'cross check' i've ever seen, but I'll grant that it wasn't the ideal reaction. Plenty of reasonably explanations though - your hands are full of your stick...makes it hard to hug the guy.
So now that this vile, reprehensible, calculating, villain of a man has carried out his devious plan while seeing the red mist, one might expect he would huff and puff with an angry look on his face. Or maybe he's such a devious psychopath that he knows to keep skating to the bench like he barely knows what just happened, and sit there hunched over for a few seconds, and then with an essentially blank expression (I might go so far as foggy-eyed, but I would hope we can all agree there was no anger on his face...perhaps mild frustration at most).
I'm almost certain I remember seeing video of Wideman and Henderson chatting after the incident. Not that it means Henderson can't/shouldn't sue. But IMO it does support the 'accident' theory.
Nobody in the building thought it was real issue until after the game, when the infamous gif surfaced, Francis stirred the pot, and a bunch of sheeple found a way to vindicate their pathetic lives by further denigrating a player they've collectively decided is ruining their favourite hockey team because he eats up salary cap space and isn't playing as well as the previous year. I guarantee the reaction here would have been vastly different if the incident involved Giordano, Monahan, or Wideman 1 year earlier.
Okay, now that last sentence was overflowing with snark and full of assumptions (and is mostly tongue-in-cheek). Occam's razor might not support that sentence, but I think it does apply to the rest of my analysis. Most of y'all are making bold assumptions to Wideman's state of mind (ie. angry) - I contend he acted exactly as one would expect him to after being plastered into the boards. Wideman set his path to the bench before Henderson really started skating backwards. The situation simply came towards him (and IMO Wideman didn't react at all until .25 seconds before they collided).
I'll also pose Hanlon's Razor here: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence". I won't pretend to know the inner-workings of Wideman's mind, but it seems a lot more probable to be that he was on fuzzy autopilot mode (ie. incompetent) than angry vengeance mode (ie. malicious) based on everything I've posted above.
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Solid,but need more Razors
Hume's razor: "If the cause, assigned for any effect, be not sufficient to produce it, we must either reject that cause, or add to it such qualities as will give it a just proportion to the effect."
Hitchens's razor: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."