Paul Stewart: Under Further Review of Wideman Incident

Nice stuff here Paul. It's interesting to note the Burke angle in the example you provided. It's funny how a person can go from one side of the 'law' to the other in this league. I often wonder if that happens in other fields/leagues as much as it seems to in the NHL

Burkie is a lawyer and is in the defend your client mode.... i'm sure if he was on the other side of this equation, he'd stick with his own precedent...

given the obvious intent to assault (and yeah in my mind it is assault, because the ref wasn't playing the game, nor wearing pads for contact). Sideman knew what he was doing, and who he was doing it to, he got angry and took it out on the ref. In my mind that is worse than any of the mentioned cases, to be honest I was so shocked to see it happen. I wouldn't be surprised if he got like 15-25 games, unless he can really prove he was "woozy".

In 1998, Mike Peca was with the Buffalo Sabres, not Columbus!

Good post, Paul. Completely agree with this analysis.

The part of this analysis I dislike is the "nobody saw it happen, so a penalty was not called" as preventing the incident from being fully investigated as what it was: abuse of an official. It's almost like society has it right when almost every crime that happens on the streets is videotaped; "if it's not caught on tape, it did not happen"...well this was caught on tape and the guy should be punished as severely as possible, even if no officials gave a penalty.

I am not known for condoning violence as I do not think it solves anything and I am not condoning it here but against my character I am finding myself very torn on this whole situation. The reason being I can understand why players and coaches may be getting so frustrated with the poor refereeing that this sort of thing has happened. They missed what looks to me to be a boarding call on the initial play that left the guy with a concussion. The officiating in this league and in other pro sports is garbage and that has to be frustrating when calls are constantly being blown. It certainly looks from the video that he did it on purpose even if he cant remember it and may not have known what he was doing at the time. Regardless, you cannot do that. All i'm saying is I can understand the frustration that may lead to it.