Good points. With Kassian, I was pissed at first, but with his personal demons he had to overcome and him coming over to become a productive player without all of the shenanigans of his early years, I had forgiven him. Last year he became a little unhinged and so I'm less supportive now, but he seems to again have overcompensated to the point of not being useful.
For Lucic, I remember him being a tough bugger that occasionally crossed the line but I don't recall nearly as many incidents as you see with Wilson nowadays. And I definitely don't remember seeing him attacking a 170lb skill player before. For the incident in Vancouver, it definitely seemed like he was incited into it and was mostly just defending himself.
For Eager. Yup, never liked that.
Short fuses short circuit. This is a common element in the mentality of players that become hockey fighters, not quite by accident. Combine this with walking CTE, addictions, substance abuse problems and neural and other damage done from the same and a lot of these people can do really stupid things, like assault people, on the ice or in public.
We follow a league though where the on ice component of willfull violence is freely condoned, and a league that argues against CTE, argues that hockey assaults are part of hockey, or even part of hockey traditional enforcement.
When I watch what Wilson did I know this is part of condoned NHL hockey. Whether it should be condoned can be a discussion. Whether it is condoned isn't really. What player and conduct has ever been banned from the NHL? Bertuzzi, and pretty much that was forced on them. The league had to ban Bertuzzi. I can't even remember other modern era banned players.
NHL jurisprudence is designed so that players like Lucic, Kassian, Wilson have the longest possible full careers to sell WWE type interest.
