The tired old cliché “There’s something in the water,” couldn’t ring truer here.

A month or so ago Islanders defenseman Thomas Pock received a five-game suspension for delivering an elbow shiver to the head of Ottawa Senators forward Ryan Shannon. Why it wasn’t the cleanest play in the world, it was more of a hard elbow “leaning” than a straightforward elbow delivered with malicious intent to injure. Seriously, what I used to do to Karl Malone when I played NBA Jam in arcades throughout Brooklyn during the late-’90s would have been far worse if it wasn’t virtual.

Over the weeks that followed,that incident, we’ve a couple of other elbows thrown with much better precision and accuracy, to only land shorter suspensions.

We’ve also seen the NHL’s poster boy, Sidney Crosby, punch someone in their nads and get nothing for it.

Now, it appears that Jarkko Ruutu is a lot more than an annoying Fin, who is in serious need of a phone booth meeting with someone like Eric Cairns.

He’s a vampire.

Biting the hand of Buffalo Sabres forward Andrew Peter’s the other night, Ruutu gets only a two-game suspension? I know that the injury a player suffers in lieu of the incident and what the league has charged other players with when similar infractions occur play a part in the end result, but seriously NHL, two games?

Biting someone in any sport is a grotesque action, even in MMA contests. A two-game suspension is a slap on the wrist. If it was something questionable, a-la a hit from semi-behind with two moving players, that is one thing, especially when you consider how fast this game is, but when a player’s glove is in your face and you decide to bite it, you don’t belong on the ice, you belong in a doctor’s office.

The Dallas Stars took the moral high road when they told Sean Avery to take a hike, maybe it’s time for Senators to do the same thing with Ruutu.

That seems extremely unlikely however when the league dishes out insignificant penalties such as these. Also considering how the game isn’t allowed to police itself the way it did, say, a decade ago, guys like Ruutu, if reined in properly, are worth a ton to teams. If this happened in 1994, I can easily rattle off a list of players on the Sabres alone that would have challenged Ruutu right after this occurred. In today’s NHL however, skill supersedes heart and loyalty, making for a game that I sometimes have a problem of recognizing.

Posted under 2008-2009, NHL, Random Rant