BY MARK SPECTOR
sportsnet.ca

EDMONTON - Ryan Malone walked past Mattias Ohlund's interview on the way to the trainer's room, got the gist of the topic, leaned in and let loose.

"It was a %#@ing joke," he said. "%$$ing disrespectful is what it was."

Check the place line, and you can probably guess what the Tampa veteran was fuming over.

So let the great debate begin: Did Edmonton's Linus Omark cross a clearly delineated line when he did a spinneramma at the blue-line before slapping the puck five-hole on Dan Ellis to give the Edmonton Oilers a 4-3 win?

Or is Omark, who had the temerity to make such a landmark move in his first National Hockey League game, simply on the cutting edge of where the game is going?

Ohlund, the classy veteran Swede and a countryman of Omark's, chose his words more carefully than Malone. Still, you could see in his eyes that he was completely unimpressed.

"If one of our young guys did that, the (veterans) would tell him not to do it anymore," Ohlund said.

Was it disrespectful? "Absolutely," he stated. "It's the spinneramma at the blue-line. It has no effect on whether he scores or not."

Is there any question that a spinneramma 60 feet from the net has nothing whatsoever to do with the final result of the shootout try? And if the answer is yes, then we must deduce that the move is purely for the purposes of showing off, something that has never been deemed acceptable inside an NHL dressing room.

Then again, what if the ancient hockey paradigm is shifting?

For example, on Steve Stamkos' shootout try immediately before Omark's, he skated the puck to the hashmarks and blasted a slapshot that Nikolai Khabibulin somehow gloved.

Was there a time, perhaps when the shootout was instituted for the 2005-06 season, that Stamkos' move was considered hot-dogging?

"I remember back in the '94 Olympics in Lillehammer," Oilers head coach Tom Renney said after the game, hearkening back to Peter Forsberg's one-handed shootout winning deke on Canada's Corey Hirsch. "The thing ended in a shootout, and I wasn't real happy. One of our guys said, 'Why don't they just throw a football through a tire?'

"If that's what it boils down to," he shrugged. "We have the shootout. It's entertainment. Eighteen or 19,000 people had a helluva lot of fun watching that."

In '94 , we'd never seen a move like Forsberg's. Until Dec. 10, 2010, we'd never seen a spinneramma at the blue-line.

Also in '94, when the players were locked out and bargaining for a bigger piece of the pie, didn't they endlessly reminds us that this was the entertainment business, and they were the entertainers?

So Omark entertained. What's the problem?

"Nice goal, good move by him," said another Tampa vet, Simon Gagne. "But in the NHL, there is a line. You don't want to cross it. I think that time, it was a little bit too much."

Martin St. Louis, who was disgusted by the act said, "A little Youngblood-ish."

In Edmonton's room, Omark came across as either totally disrespectful of every tradition ever passed down from one generation of NHLer to the next, or just completely ignorant of their existence.

"That's my thing. I like to do it for the crowd," he said. "That's my game. I do stuff like that. Why should I stop at this level? I knew that if I scored, we win the game, so I took the chance."

This is a player who came to us as a Youtube sensation. Let's put that into perspective:

Old school players like Ken Daneyko, Dean Kennedy and Wendel Clark? They'd hate this stuff.

But the Internet didn't even EXIST when they played.

In many ways, these young Oilers represent the new NHL. But is this kind of behaviour going to be part of that?

"Look at our room," said stay-at-home defenceman Jim Vandermeer. "It's all kids in here. People come here and pay a lot of money to get entertained. That was entertaining."

"He's got the tools. Why not use them?" said rookie Magnus Paajarvi. "The crowd went nuts, so that was pretty fun to watch. That's a pretty good debut. I've seen a lot of moves from Omark. He's always got something."

Think Mike Richards and P.K. Subban. A veteran, a rookie, and a certain accepted way of doing things.

It's a thorny, thorny issue on which we'll give another young star, Stamkos, the final word:

"Look at Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin, two of the best players in the game. They're not doing anything like that. Showboating like that? A lot of guys in that (Oilers) dressing room won't like stuff like that."

Those guys get into the game for free however.

We're thinking the paying customers are just fine with it.

Mark Spector is the lead columnist for Sportsnet.ca