I think the animosity is blown up due to the media between ottawa and toronto. The mayors of the two cities start challenging each other making bets. The councellors of Ottawa challenge the councellors or Toronto to a hockey match. Local Newspapers start saying that the other teams suck and putting down the other team. When in fact both teams are very good and play a very different style of hockey.
Ottawa is young, fast and although they can and sometimes do play a physical game, that really isnt their specialty. Toronto is on the other hand is an older team, many verterans on the team and well they aren't as fast as the SENS however they do rely more on brute force then speed, however they do have a few spurts now and then.
I am and always have been a Leaf fan and will continue to be. However what has been going on between the two teams just isnt right. There have been kids fighting in the school yard because one is a Sens fan and the other a Leafs fan. Ottawa accuses the Leafs and Toronto itself of being arrogant stuck up, when Ottawa should just look at themselves and see that they are the very same way. Whatever happened to the pure joy of hockey where it didnt matter what fan you were you just loved hockey.
Ottawa fans accuse the Leafs of being a dirty team, and because we do rely on brute force a little more then the Sens it doesnt make us a dirty team. All I can say is that the Leafs dont have the finess to hide what goes on like the Sens do. Last nights game was terribly officiated. They were highly inconsistent. What they did call on one team they didnt call on the other. Sometimes they would call the interference and other times they wouldnt, sometimes they called the tripping and sometimes they didnt. On the whole it was terribly officiated equally on both sides.
To make this clear to some who think there should have been a penalty when Todd White got hurt. That was a clean check that Todd White was about to give however he missed the player and his face made contact with the glass and tore his lip open, quite severly in fact. However non the less there was nothing dirty about that play, just an unfortunate accident. From the mid of the first period I counted how many calls there should have been for each team and how many cheap shots there were. Toronto had 9 penalties that should have been called and Ottawa had 10 had the refs continued to call what they had been. Not bad pretty equal I say so for anyone who thinks that the Sens arent dirty or above the Leafs I think you are mistaken. I think refs need to be consistent, need to call penalties but also need to let them play the game, to many penalties will make the game get out of hand and vice versa. One last thing before I go. Too many people do not know what BOARDING is and to clarify this here is the definition.
BOARDING: Any unnecessary contact with a player playing the puck on an obvious "icing" or "off-side" play which results in that player being knocked into the boards is "boarding" and must be penalized as such. In other instances where there is no contact with the boards, it should be treated as "charging". "Rolling" an opponent (if he is the puck carrier) along the boards where he is endeavoring to go through too small an opening is not boarding. However, if the opponent is not the puck carrier, then such action should be penalized as boarding, charging, interference or, if the arms or stick are employed, it should be called holding or hooking.
RULE OF THUMB if a player is two or more strides away from the boards and is checked into the boards that is considered BOARDING!
Yesterday ||Tomorrow