Hockey Players Telling On Themselves To The Refs For Flopping Is All The Rage These Days
You look across the landscape of all sports right now and one of the biggest issues is flopping. Obviously this epidemic got its start in soccer, then quickly made it's way over to basketball, but now we are seeing hints of flopping everywhere. It's disgusting. It's cowardly. It makes me want to vomit all over myself whenever I see such a shameful act. But for some reason, nobody has felt the need to step in and come up with a way to combat flopping. That is, of course, besides hockey players.
Everybody knows that hockey players are the epitome of class. They play the game with honor and they're not going to completely disgrace the game by flopping like a bunch of soccer playing pussies. And on the off chance that they do end up embellishing some contact, they make sure to immediately notify the official so that an unwarranted penalty is not issued. Like former NHLer Jakub Kindl here who is now playing in the German professional league. He takes a spill along the boards, from the referee's view point it looks like he was tripped but in reality he just caught an edge, so he then tells the official "hey, bud, I just busted my ass on my own ya know. Be a beautician for me real quick and just call off that penalty, eh?". The sportsmanship there is off the charts. And what's crazy is that this wasn't the only time this week that such a situation had happened.
On Friday night the Philadelphia Flyers were in New Jersey taking on the Devils. In the 3rd period of a tied game with just over 3 minutes left in regulation, the refs were about to call a high sticking penalty on Damon Severson. The only issue is that Severson's stick never actually made contact with Jake Voracek's grill piece.
So what does Voracek do? The only honorable thing and tells the ref that there wasn't actually a high sticking penalty to be called there. So Severson stays out of the box and the Hockey Gods end up rewarding the Flyers with a shootout win later in the night.
Again, flopping is a disease that is rotting pretty much every sport we know from the inside out. But not hockey. Because hockey players have too much class for that shit.