Down Goes Brown's Grab Bag: First-Round Playoff Outrage

(Editor's note: Welcome to Sean McIndoe's Friday grab bag, where he writes on a variety of NHL topics. You can follow him on Twitter.)

The third star: Shawn Thornton—We can argue over whether he's still a useful hockey player, but as throwback trash-talkers go, he's been the runaway star of the Panthers/Islanders series. There was his classic "I don't know your name" routine on Ryan Strome in Game 1. Then he elevated his game, going after Cal Clutterbuck with the old crying baby impression.

Nice work, big guy. Just remember to keep the water bottle to yourself this year.

The second star: Wayne and Janet Gretzky—Man, nobody can score in the NHL these days.

Gretzky gets shut down by his wife — CAPITALS HILL (@CapitalsHill)April 21, 2016

The first star: Jamie Benn—Hey, if you're going to get tripped face-first into the boards, at least get a nice photo out of it.

Jamie Benn is ready for his close-up — Pete Blackburn (@PeteBlackburn)April 17, 2016

(And it did turn out to be a pretty nice shot.)

The issue: Everything!

The outrage: [cannon balls out of nearest window; parkour rolls across lawn; runs down street punching random pedestrians in the face].

Is it justified: The first round of the NHL playoffs is the most outrageous time of the year, one in which almost every game brings some new incident for everyone to scream at each other about. Instead of trying to wade through everything, let's do this lightning-round style. No more than three sentences per outrage.

I am outraged at Flyers fans!—Yeah, Tuesday night was pretty bad, and virtually everyone agrees. Just remember: You're awful, too, sometimes, and so am I, because every hockey fan is and this is the time of year when our worst instincts can get the best of us. Shake your head at Flyers fans, sure, but don't pretend your favorite team's fan base isn't capable of the same stupidity.

I am outraged at Justin Abdelkader!—The Red Wings' agitator has had an interesting series, one in which he pummeled Mike Blunden in Game 2, then turned down an invitation from Brian Boyle in Game 3 (and was mocked for it). Yes, he had an injured hand which was taped, and it's not really his job to fight there, anyway. But given what he'd done to Blunden, it's fair to say it wasn't a good look.

I'm a Red Wings fan and I am outraged that people are outraged at Justin Abdelkader!—Oh, we know! We found that out after Game 3, when the entire fan base mysteriously discovered rule 46.15 at the same time (and misunderstood how it works, but that's an argument for another day). Go ahead and defend your player, Wings fans, but let's not pretend that the city that gave us Bob Probert, Joey Kocur and McCarty vs. Lemieux wouldn't feel very differently about payback if the roles were reversed.

I am Cal Clutterbuck, and I am outraged that someone stepped on our logo!—The whole logo on the floor thing isn't really a tradition in the sense that it's a relatively new development, and it goes without saying that it's completely ridiculous for teams to be upset about someone stepping on a logo when they sell floor mats plastered with it. So let's all remember that none of this is about the sanctity of the logo or respecting the team or anything else; rather, it's about giving players a chance to berate and belittle the media in a socially acceptable way. That's mostly fine—most of us probably deserve an f-bomb hurled our way every now and then—but let's stop playing along with the idea that it's anything more than that.

I am outraged that you're blatantly abusing hyphens and semi-colons to get around your self-imposed three sentence limit!—Shut up.

I am outraged at the offside rule!—We covered this a little bit last week, and I stand by what I wrote then: You can either support the concept of offside review and accept that it's going to occasionally be slow and annoyingly nit-picky, or you can want to abolish it altogether. I suspect that the last week has shifted more and more fans into the latter camp. I think I might be headed there with them.

I am outraged that somebody said "offsides" instead of "offside!"—Go away. This is prime outrage season, none of us have time to get sidetracked with semantics.

I am outraged that suspensions aren't tough enough in the playoffs!—No argument here; remember, I'm the guy who made this. Just remember that, as always, the Department of Player Safety is working within the guidelines that the league and its GMs have given them. Suspensions won't get tougher until the league wants them to, and right now they clearly don't.

I am outraged that Andrew Shaw was suspended for using a slur!—Don't be. The NHL got this one exactly right. And don't bring up Kris Letang's non-suspension for slashing Viktor Stalberg; they're two very different situations, with decisions handed down by two different departments.

I'm a Red Wings fan and I am outraged that you called this a "Lightning" round and revealed your obvious bias!—Seriously, settle down, Detroit. Deep breaths. Nobody give these guys any light-up wristbands.

I am outraged that the Oilers won the draft lottery again!—Whoops, sorry. That one's for next weekend.

The most memorable moment of the first round so far may have been the horrific goal allowed by Steve Mason during Game 2 of the Flyers/Caps series, one that's unquestionably in the running for the worst of all time. As guys like Vesa Toskala and Tommy Salo could tell you, goals like that can be career-defining. In fact, it's hard to think of anything worse than giving one up.

Well, except for giving up two. To the same guy. In back-to-back playoff games. Especially if the guy who scored them was a defensive defenseman like this week's obscure player, Bill Houlder. (Thanks to reader Stephen for the suggestion.)

Houlder was a fourth-round pick of the Capitals in 1985, and made his NHL debut two years later. He'd go on to enjoy a classic journeyman's career, lasting 16 NHL seasons while suiting up for seven different teams. He was a classic stay-at-home blueliner, never cracking 40 points but providing a steadying presence, often for some very bad teams. His best year came with the expansion Mighty Ducks in 1993-94, when he scored 14 goals and, far more importantly, earned an overall rating of 50 in NHL '94.

But as impressive as Houlder's NHL career was, he may be best remembered for what he did to poor Kay Whitmore in the 1991 AHL Calder Cup final. Here's Houlder in Game 5 of that series:

That's brutal. I bet you couldn't score a worse goal if you tr… wait, I'm being told we have a clip from Game 6.

Oof. You have to feel bad for Whitmore, who went on to a decent journeyman career of his own and is now the NHL's senior director of hockey operations, where you may know him as the latest guy charged with solving the league's longstanding goaltender equipment problem. I wonder if he ever held a grudge?

On a completely unrelated note, the top YouTube clip from Houlder's NHL days is one in which he has the misfortune of getting too close to a legendary rampage by Vancouver enforcer Gino Odjick. Hey, I feel like the Canucks' goalie directing traffic in the middle of all that looks vaguely familiar…

It's the playoffs, which means every hit results in at least one fan base screaming for a suspension. Yelling at each other over borderline hits is part of the playoff experience at this point, and social media has made it easier than ever. We may as well embrace it.

But there's one subsection of the debate squad that needs to knock it off: The ones that insist on arguing their case by taking screen grabs of a single frame from the incident, and presenting it as proof of guilt or innocence. People, we have video these days. We have GIFs. We have Vines. We probably have five other things that you kids are using now because old people like me found out about GIFs and Vines. We don't need still images.

And that's especially true of the standard cheap tactic of this genre: The screengrab of the moment after a hit. Look, his skates are off the ice! Look, his elbow is up! Well, yes, because that's what happens on the follow-through of virtually every big hit. It doesn't tell us anything about whether the actual impact was clean or dirty.

Screengrabs are misleading, almost always intentionally so. If you see someone using them to make their case, assume they're arguing in bad faith and ignore them.

The first round of the playoffs is the very best time to be a hockey fan. That's partly because every game matters, and partly because there's just so many of them. It's impossible to keep all the storylines and plot twists straight, and after a few games everything just descends into a chaotic mix of frantic madness.

And now, it's almost over. So let's celebrate the last few days of opening round madness by traveling back almost exactly 20 years to revisit the short-lived hockey tradition that captured it the best: Mid-90s Fox Sports playoff intros.

• It's April 21, 1996, and we're settling in for a Saturday afternoon of playoff hockey on Fox. Yes, younger readers, Fox had the NHL TV contract for five years beginning in 1995. Many fans remember this era for the FoxTrac glowing puck. Me, I prefer to remember it for something positive: the network's insistence on hyping every broadcast with a completely insane montage of highlights, special effects, old stock footage, dancing girls, angry robots, and weird puns.

• "The past is past [image of the Montreal Canadiens]." Yep, I'm enjoying this already.

• Just up front: About 600 different things are going to happen over the next minute and a half, and we're not going to be able to cover everything. Feel free to head to the comments, where we'll break into smaller discussion groups to work through everything else.

• Someone in an Eric Lindros jersey is bowing to the Stanley Cup for some reason. Even in a Fox montage, he can't keep his head up.

• That woman's banner read "Down 0-2 But Not Out" in case you missed it. And she turned out to be right—the Rangers came back and won the series in six.

• Just for the record: Nobody ever called Vincent Damphousse "Vincent Van Gogh." Not once. We did call him "Damp House" when he first broke into the league, though. OK, that may have just been me. For about three years. I was not a very bright kid.

• Things you would not see in a 2016 NHL montage: A sucker punch to the head, followed by a graphic of a stick smashing a human brain. Progress?

• "Great balls of Fleury." Um, OK. I'll take your word for it on that one.

• The thing that always killed me about these montages were the parts they obviously had to film themselves. Like, somebody was in charge of setting a keyboard on fire. Somebody else had to pretend to get electrocuted. And then somebody had to volunteer to put on a Flames jersey and a dollar-store goalie mask and get sprayed with a fire extinguisher. I wonder where that guy is today.

• Oh wait, I found him.

• Ha ha, Jets fans are losing their team to Phoenix and the Fox Sports guys made a funny about their accents. You can maybe see why Canadian hockey fans were getting a little crusty about the Gary Bettman era right around here.

• "In the playoffs, death comes suddenly…" Whoa, this turned dark real fast.

• We got to the studio with James Brown and Dave Maloney, who discuss the Rangers and Penguins both being down 2-0 and looking for a comeback. My favorite part is Brown getting in a "and the Caps know all about that" dig about Washington's history of choking away leads. This was 20 years and six chokes ago. Speaking of which, how are you doing after losing Game 4 to the Flyers, Caps fans? All good? I'm sure they're all good.

• We then spend a few minutes going around the league, which gives us a chance to see the Murderers' Row of broadcasting talent Fox threw at these games. Doc Emrick, Sam Rosen and Kenny Albert? Were Pat Summerall and Vin Scully sick that day?

• "Up until now, the only pressure Montreal has had has been in its tires," quips Emrick, before adding: "Which are attached to cars that, if they lose this series, will be on fire."

• Rosen is coming to us from "the ol' ballpark," and no, that's not a weird inside joke. The Lightning used to play at a baseball stadium. In Game 4 of this series, they'd set a record for single-game NHL attendance that stood until the league started playing outdoor games.

• We get a goaltending update. In is Jeff Reese, who holds the record for most assists in one game by a goaltender (which still stands). Out is Darren Puppa, who holds the record for most times making 8-year-olds laugh at the mention of his last name (which was later broken by Ron Tugnutt).

• On to Albert for a Jets/Red Wings update. Yes, there really was a time when the Red Wings were sitting on the NHL's longest Stanley Cup drought. It would extend one more season, thanks to an upset loss to the Avalanche in the conference finals (that would double as the genesis for their epic rivalry), before they'd win four Cups in 12 years starting in 1997.

• Finally, we head to Calgary, where Jiggs McDonald has an update on a teenager who'll be making his NHL debut for the Flames. Yes, it's a baby-faced Jarome Iginla, confusing everyone by wearing No. 24. He'd end up having an assist in a 7-5 loss.

• "0 Canada." Nice. Hey, remember when Canadian teams went two days without scoring a playoff goal instead of two months?

• Maloney correctly predicts that the Jets and Flames are toast, and with that we're done. We cut to commercial, but not before a Fox Sports robot shows up and transforms into a vacuum cleaner. Why a vacuum cleaner? Because it was the mid-90s, and everything about the NHL sucked.

• Oh, there's also a quick shot of a Maple Leafs player getting checked by an electricity-infused Blackhawk, hitting the ice, and then exploding. Come back to us, Fox NHL broadcasts. We miss you so much.

Have a question, suggestion, old YouTube clip, or anything else you'd like to see included in this column? Email Sean at nhlgrabbag@gmail.com.