Shawn Thornton sees red

Bruins enforcer Shawn Thornton took an accidental skate to the face. He was finishing his check behind the net, Fernando Pisani tripped over a teammate, Thornton fell as well and landed face-first on Pisani's skate blade. Fortunately for everyone involved it was a relatively superficial cut and Thornton was able to have something of a sense of humor about it afterwards. The interesting thing is that as Thornton is being escorted back to the Bruins bench by a referee, someone yells something from Blackhawks bench that infuriates him. Thornton needs to be restrained by the ref to prevent him from diving into the enemy bench with blood streaming down his face. This is obviously the healthy reaction. I could not find an embeddable clip of it (fuck you ESPN!). There is a pretty good clip of it on the Sports Grid that was recorded off of someone's DVR so it will probably get taken down by the NHL sooner or later. There is also a clip of his post game interview that is worth a watch.

Instead I'll include a clip of Thornton pounding on Matt Cooke from Cookie's first game in Boston after essentially ending Marc Savard's career. I noticed a couple of things after gleefully watching this somewhere between 1 and 11,000 times. First Thornton went for his helmet then realized Cookie wanted to fight helmets on, forcing him to punch Cookie in the hard plastic a couple of times before disgustedly ripping off his helmet. Second Cookie obviously went into the fight with the intention of getting punched once and going down, much to Thornton's disgust. The Bruins enforcer is a veteran of many fights so when he goes off protocol and hits a player whose fallen you know he did not feel like he got a good shot in there. Of course we should expect this sort of behavior from Cookie who much prefers cheap shots to physical combat.