While most parts of the human body are considered to be fair game during a hockey fight, there are certain tactics and methods which are frowned upon as a way of forcing the point across. Saturday night, Los Angeles Kings left winger Brendan Lemieux stepped over that line by bloodying his pearly whites on the captain of the Ottawa Senators.
With 6:09 left in the third period between the Kings and the Senators, Senators left winger Brady Tkachuk shoved Kings forward Blake Lizotte, prompting Lemieux to come to his defense. The two began brawling before being subdued by officials, after which Tkachuk showed officials his hand on the way to the penalty box.
After initially being assessed a five-minute match penalty, Lemieux was ejected from the game for biting Tkachuk twice during their fight. The Kings would go on to win the game 4-2.
Tkachuk was indignant about the biting incident, calling it “the most gutless thing somebody could ever do” before attacking Lemieux’s character.
“This guy, you can ask any one of his teammates, nobody ever wants to play with him. This guy is a bad guy and a bad teammate. He focuses on himself all the time,” Tkachuk said in a report by Bruce Garrioch of TSN. “The guy’s just a joke. He shouldn’t be in the league. This guy’s gutless. No other team wants him, he’s going to keep begging to be in the NHL but no other team is going to want him. He’s an absolute joke. I can’t even wrap my head around it. People don’t even do this. He’s just a bad guy.
“It’s outrageous. Kids don’t even do that anymore. Babies do that. I don’t even know what he was thinking, he’s just a complete brickhead. He’s got nothing up there. Bad guy, bad player, but what a joke he is.”
Coincidentally, Lemieux and Tkachuk’s brawl was a second-generation iteration of a fight between players. In the 1996 World Cup of Hockey, both players’ fathers — Claude Lemieux and Keith Tkachuk — fought each other as well.
