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Alain Vigneault complains that the Blackhawks ran up the score during last night’s 7-1 beating

vigneaultbellyaching

James O’Brien

We live in a society in which the painful parts of life are being child-proofed more and more every day.

Dodgeball is being outlawed. Youth football game scoreboards are turned blank if a team outscores another team by a particularly lopsided margin. “Mercy rules” abound on just about every level before you hit the professional ranks, although the occasional college football team will score 83 points.

While I value sportsmanship in its many wonderful forms - from enforcers displaying the occasional moment of compassion to the playoff tradition of teams shaking hands after bludgeoning each other for four to seven games - there comes a point in which we all need to accept the fact that competition can bring out the ugly side of people. Sometimes, that means that you have to accept the fact that your team will get their collective backsides handed to them.

The Chicago Blackhawks haven’t looked like their Stanley Cup winning selves much lately, but they still seem to own the Vancouver Canucks. If you ask Canucks coach Alain Vigneault, they weren’t too shy about displaying their dominance during Saturday night’s drubbing.

Vigneault accused Quenneville of running up the score when the Hawks had a five-on-three power play while holding a 6-0 lead early in the third period. After penalties to the Canucks’ Alexander Edler and Dan Hamhuis, Quenneville sent out several of his top players with the two-man advantage during which they did not score.

“Obviously, we’re going to have to find a way to play better at home against the team,” Vigneault said after the game. “We basically embarrassed ourselves tonight in front of our fans and (the Hawks) did everything they could to rub it in our face. (It was) 6-0 and they throw their No. 1 power-play unit when it’s five-on-three. They have every right to do that. They did it. They were pushing it, and they did.”

When asked during his postgame news conference about Vigneault’s comments, Quenneville wasn’t entirely sure how to respond because he hadn’t heard them.

“It’s tough to comment because I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Quenneville said. “I was rolling four lines. I don’t know if that was an insult or not an insult but I was worrying about playing everybody.”


It doesn’t seem like Vigneault is going into full scale whine mode - and you have to assume that he probably wouldn’t bring such a thing up if he slept on it - but it still comes off a bit like belly aching.

The only error Quenneville made is putting those top players on the ice in a time in which the Canucks might be especially irritable; that’s a prime situation for a less scrupled player to take his aggressions out on an opponent. These teams have hated each other since their hair-pulling days, so this just adds another altercation to their mounting tensions.

Of course, right now this has been more of a “hammer and nail” rivalry than anything else, so if the Canucks want to get revenge they need to do so in the area that matters the most: the scoreboard.