Thursday night's contest between the Leafs and Bruins turned out to be a wildly entertaining game if you're a fan of old school, rough and tumble hockey, and if you didn't look at the scoreboard.
Jake McCabe instigated the violence early, throwing a couple of beautiful, nasty, satisfying crosschecks into the teeth of both Jake DeBrusk and Brad Marchand. Marchand would respond minutes later with a blatant, uncalled cheap shot on Matthew Knies, Knies would leave the game and not return.
Things only got nastier in the second period. The referees failed to get the game under control and scrums began to break out after nearly every whistle. On one such occasion, Tyler Bertuzzi, already bloodied by a high stick, got into a disagreement with Bruins defenseman Parker Wotherspoon. Bertuzzi dropped his gloves while issuing an invitation for Wotherspoon to do the same. After some deliberation, Wotherspoon decided to drop his as well. As it turned out, that was a mistake.
As you can see above, Bertuzzi waited, like a gentleman, for Wotherspoon to shed his gloves before throwing a punch. Once he did, Bertuzzi proceeded to beat the living snot out of him, raining lefts and then throwing some beautiful uppercuts. It looked less like a hockey fight and more like the type of beat down you'd see outside a Sudbury dive bar. It also looked exactly how you'd imagine a fight involving a guy with the name "Parker Wotherspoon" would go.
