Off Ice Controversy; Racism and Tortorella

Over the past couple of days, a couple of events stirred the internet.

First off, was an event that occurred on Halloween night. Phoenix Coyotes forward Raffi Torres dressed up with his wife for a Halloween party. Their costume was creative and cute yet many found it offensive.

Torres wore a mask of rapper Jay-Z and Mrs. Torres wore the mask of Jay-Z's pregnant wife Beyonce'. 

Harmless? Apparently not. The argument ensued (mostly of Twitter). While it seemed most analysts and players were backing up Raffi's costume, there still seemed to be a handful of fans who found it offensive. One person in particular, even took offense to Paul Bissonnette (aka @BizNasty2point0) backing up his teammate.

For me, I don't understand what the big deal is. I've seen plenty of "white" kids dressing up as Lebron James before. Was that racist? It's only respect. And I found it troubling that so many people didn't understand it. 

The other controversial situation happened today. Last night, the San Jose' Sharks completed their East Coast Road Trip with an ugly 5-2 loss against the New York Rangers. Out of frustration, Sharks captain Joe Thornton issued a statement saying that the Rangers were the "softest team we played on the road trip."

Now was that a nice thing to say? Well not exactly. It's never a good thing to downgrade your opponent even after the game and especially not if they just defeated you. So I'll say it wasn't the right thing to do on Joe's part.

Let's look at the Sharks road trip though. They started off with a shootout come-from-behind win in New Jersey. Then they went on to beat Boston, Detroit, and Nashville in a row (not an easy task). Next they beat the Islanders on a cheap overtime goal. Next, after going 5-0 on this difficult road trip, they fell to the Rangers.

First let's see the position of the Rangers going into last night vs. the other teams the Sharks played on their road trip.

Nashville: 12 points

Detroit: 10 points

Devils: 9 points

Rangers: 9 points

Islanders: 8 points

Boston: 6 points

So statistically the Rangers weren't even the worst team. The top 5 teams shown are all doing pretty well this year while Boston is struggling pretty badly. But I'll take Thornton's word for it that the Rangers seemed to be the weakest of the bunch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzz9_864zo&feature=youtu.be&hd=1

Well no controversy with the Rangers passes without a word from their often colourful head coach John Tortorella. The coach is known for getting into disputes with reporters, to spraying fans in the first row with water. Well he bounced back by pointing out the obvious in that "Joe (Thornton) hasn't won a goddamn thing in this league."

Brutal.

My question is did John go over the line or was he defending himself after Thornton went over the line (as always, I'm interested to hear what my audience thinks so let me know). 

In my opinion, Tortorella has a history of saying bad things at bad times so I want to put him at fault but I think he was sort of right. In today's sport, this demonstration of poor sportsmanship isn't acceptable. Joe may not have been trying to point out the weakness of the Rangers team, he probably just was disappointed with his team against a team they should have beat, but he shouldn't have said.