There are slightly more than 700 men who began the season as National Hockey League players this fall, if you include those on injured reserve.
So think this through: In a group that large, how many guys exist who are dumb enough to do what James Wisniewski did on Monday afternoon on Long Island?
That's what it comes down to for NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. Sample size.
If you think Bettman lies awake at night wondering how to make cookie-cutter model citizens out of the entire membership of the NHL Players' Association, you're kidding yourself.
Instead, he knows that on a certain number of days each season he will be asked to comment on an obscene gesture like Wisniewski's, a player who was arrested for public intoxication (Mike Ribeiro), a player who delivers a dangerous hit from behind (Niklas Hjalmarsson), someone who endures a frightening health episode (Ondrej Pavelec), or a manager who so completely mishandles his payroll that his team can only ice 17 players in an NHL game (New Jersey GM Lou Lamoriello).
We will bet, however, that Bettman did not expect to have dealt with all of the above before the 2010-11 season was a week old.
Of course, the most overtly embarrassing occurrence on the weekend was Wisniewski, a surname we believe to be Polish for "That idiot on our blue-line."
He is, by this North American definition courtesy the Urban Dictionary, the classic "mook": An archetypal young male (teens-early 20s) who acts like a moronic bonehead. They are self-centered simpletons who live a drunken frat-boy lifestyle (or are frat-boys). Examples can be found anytime someone watches "Jackass."
Sure, there is a certain amount of base entertainment in watching Bettman sweat out a response to questions surrounding an act like the oral sex gesture Wisniewski offered up Monday. It is so not Gary, and watching his cheeks grow more and more red under the strain of an uncomfortable topic, you've got to admit, has always provided a certain base level of entertainment.
In particular Sean Avery, the consummate hockey punk at whom Wisniewski's gesture was aimed. The Rangers wing(nut) is loving that fact that the NHL's supplementary discipline machine - the finely tuned instrument that it is - will fire up this week in defence of Avery.
"I mean, it's pretty obvious what the guy was doing," Avery told reporters in Long Island after the game. "But I'm sure nothing is going to happen to him because nothing ever happens.
"Imagine if I did that. I'd be sent to rehab."
The difference is, of course, that Avery has spent a career crying out for help. The NHL's response to his gradual meltdown while in Dallas was a decision he should thank the league for every day. He was - and you'll find at least one person like this in any group of 700 young men - a troubled man who dearly needed some professional help at that time.
In comparison Wisniewski, in an obscure and unremarkable career, has simply been one of a those spell-check guys who can play 256 NHL games yet still be confused with Andy Wozniewski, the former Maple Leafs defenceman who toils now in Switzerland for Zug.
Look, what Wisniewski did was patently stupid. No more or less brainless than Avery's "sloppy seconds" comment about Dion Phaneuf that day in Calgary.
But to put the two players in the same category of offender is just as ridiculous. Just as Hjalmarsson, who we believe became the subject of NHL discipline for the first time in his career on Tuesday, can't be lumped in with a player like Colby Armstrong, a career dangerous hitter and repeat offender.
And Ribeiro?
He was always dogged by rumours of his lifestyle, but those generally emanated from those usually untrustworthy "sources in Montreal." He claims he got the wrong side of the stick when a friend reacted poorly to some abuse from another patron at a Dallas restaurant, and if Ribeiro can keep his nose clean from here on in history will record his weekend mug shot as a bad night in the life of an otherwise law-abiding citizen.
It was a tough opening week for Bettman, to be sure. But by the end of the season, the bar fights, hits from behind and obscene gestures will likely tally no higher than they did last season.
The league, just like the Maple Leafs, simply got off to a hot start in 2010-11.
