...and you would be on here defending Marchand if he played for the Lightning and licked Bergeron? "Oh that Marchand, he's just a weird fella! Let's go Bruins!"
No, I'm pretty sure I'd be pissed at him, which is exactly his intention, and is exactly what I've described entirely throughout here. It's behavior that pisses off the other team and gets them off their game without actually hurting them in any way. The point isn't that the behavior isn't going to anger the other team -
it's designed to. The point I'm making is that the worst thing about is the fact that he's actually comfortable doing it more than anything else. Like,
IT IS FUCKING WEIRD that a professional hockey player is comfortable just licking opponents on a regular basis. Not once, not twice, but at least three times that we know of to this point. If anything, I find it amazing that he's actually willing to go through with it. We've been through north of 100 years of professional sports in the United States and I don't think I've ever read anything about someone licking another player before. This is kind of new ground for us, and that's hard to do these days.
Now if the league says, "Look, we know it isn't hurting anyone but it's bad for our image to have one of our players licking someone else during a game," I don't disagree with them in the slightest. But something being bad from an image perspective is different from it being something that I'm going to get upset about and start thinking less of the guy because of. Trust me, there's plenty there already with Marchand, I don't think his play on the ice is anywhere near clean. But we're talking about licking other human beings here.
Once again, look at the last sentence I just wrote and tell me how you're going to feel 20 years from now about me having even written it. We're going to look back and laugh at it. The elbows to the head? Not so much.