The Gloves Are Off

Why did a couple of Zacks feel the need to shed their gloves this October in Edmonton to fling fists at each other’s heads? Could be, I guess, that Zack Kassian, a winger for the Oilers, disparaged Zack MacEwen’s manhood, mother, or mien. It was the NHL’s pre-season still, so maybe MacEwen, then a Vancouver Canuck, wanting to audition for his own coach, asked his rival for the pleasure of the punch in the time-honoured way of these things: “You wanna go?” Was this a warning we were seeing or maybe a dose of vengeance? Did it have to do with fulfilling an arcane rite understood only by Zacks? There was some suggestion that Vancouver’s forwards had sinned by skating too close to the Oiler goaltender Mike Smith, and so there was (in the parlance) a price to be paid, which required (as laid out, possibly, in the game’s opaque code) a message to be delivered.

It’s easy to make light of hockey’s theatre of the brutal absurd, but in the quick chaos, Kassian lost his...