Losing Sight of the Real Issue

Aside from not being funny, one of the reasons I’m not a good blogger is that I don’t like to make a post that’s just in reply to a post from another blogger on another site.

I’m still an old-school forum fan, I like threaded discussion, so I just reply at the blog itself. I figure that if you all want to read what other people have to say you’re already reading them. I don’t want to clutter up A2Y with my babbling, though, so this time I’m breaking my thoughts off there and bringing them back home.

Bill at Abel to Yzerman took offense to Greg Wyshynski’s comment that the worst thing about last night’s no goal was that it would fuel anti-Detroit conspiracy theories. Wyshynski linked to A2Y as an example.

And thus, twelve hours after the call that inspired it all, discussion was reduced to whether or not Wyshynski insulted Wings fans, whether or not he’s biased, etc.

Here’s the deal: I don’t care if he’s biased. I don’t care what he says about Wings fans. What I care about is as many people as possible talking about what an awful call that was.

I don’t think there’s a logically-minded hockey fan out there who doesn’t see that this was a bad call. We’re all united in that. The league doesn’t have to respect its fans and give us an answer, though, because it knows we’ll fall into name-calling and forget what the original issue was.

Why are blog posts being made about the reaction to the bad call? The focus should be the call itself.

It shouldn’t be about conspiracy theories or whether or not a similarly-bad call has ever gone the other way. As a whole, hockey fans should be upset every time this happens. A Coyotes fan watching Vancouver get robbed or a Flyers fan seeing a bad call against Florida, we shouldn’t brush these things off based on the team it happens to because the next time it could be our team.

Henrik Sedin had a goal waved off? Show me the video, I’ll complain about that one, too, if I think it’s justified. We live in the age of YouTube, there’s no reason not to let the video evidence speak for itself rather than our own biases towards or against individual teams.

Officiating like this hurts us all and we should all take offense to it.