Polemic Hockey

Ouch.

I'm not sure I even would expect anyone from the Anaheim media to be this cruel.

Oh, brother, did these Senators wilt. Spezza was so bad that his coach Bryan Murray vehemently berated him during the second period for his endless ennui. Spezza gave it right back because he must have been thinking about his loser coach whose playoff record smells like the Staten Island landfill.

For all his years in the NHL, Murray has never won a Stanley Cup and owns an egregiously under .500 playoff record. What he does best is hiss, moan and rip the referees as he did again last night with a wonderful result, another playoff exit on a road paved with alibis.

When all is said and done, the favorites lost because, for the first time in the playoffs, Ottawa faced a tough team; a club that hit and hit and hit. The Senators -- Heatley, Spezza, Redden -- couldn't take it. The so-called tough guy, Chris Neil, specialized in cheap shots as did Alfredsson, whose gutless shooting-the-puck-directly at-Scott Niedermayer in Game Four will go down in hockey infamy.

It's to the Ducks credit that -- once the game was in the bag -- they didn't head-hunt Alfie who was running so scared in the third period, he threw away the puck for the final goal that sealed Ottawa's doom.

The chauvinist, Canadian, cry-baby, hockey media has been having trouble handling the Senators demise. They hate the idea that yet another American team is keeping The Cup away from being in The Dominion. They still fantasize that they own hockey and the fact that a team from Anaheim, of all places, won The Cup, burns them to the very core.