And the Academy Award Goes to...

To be perfectly honest, I had a day that sort of forewarned me to not get too excited about the game today.  It was one of those days where everything just seems......off.  Sure enough, that carried directly into my viewing of this evening's match between the Detroit Red Wings and the Phoenix Coyotes.

The Wings made all the right moves to begin the game, coming out to an early 2-0 lead with goals from Pavel Datsyuk and Todd Bertuzzi.  The game looked like what you would expect: the rested Wings were taking advantage of a weary Phoenix team that went to a shootout the night before.  It was all going swimmingly.

Then: Mike Smith.

I'm still having trouble with this part, so I apologize if I'm forced to get brutally honest and some virgin ears suffer for it, but damned if I can figure out just how the hell things went the way they did.  To summarize, Datsyuk let fly a wrister toward the Coyotes net, which Mike Smith turned away with his arm...and then keeled over like he'd been poached through the chest with a goddamned harpoon (UPDATE: Upon closer examination, it looks like the puck didn't even make contact with Smith's body, it went off his stick, making this whole thing even more ridiculous...).  The refs did NOT blow the whistle, nor did they show any intent to, yet when Brian Lashoff fired the loose puck into a gaping Phoenix net, the ruling was no goal.  In the end, it was ruled that, because the goalie was "injured", the goal did not count......yet, after only a couple minutes, Mike Smith miraculously came back from the dead and kept playing.

HMM...doesn't sound like he was injured, now does it? So if he wasn't INJURED, and the ruling was no goal due to INJURY, the goal should count.  But oh no, that simply cannot be! As such, the game continued, but the atmosphere completely shifted.  The biggest problem with how the Mike Smith incident was handled wasn't so much the goal being disallowed as much as it was the boost of morale it gave the Coyotes, who would have otherwise been deflated by what would've been a crippling goal.

Instead, we got to witness the wheels come right off the big red machine on all 4 corners.  5 unanswered goals lifted the Coyotes over the Wings for a 5-2 victory, the biggest insult coming by way of the great actor Smith himself, who managed to launch the puck down into the empty Detroit net with 0.1 second left in the game.

As a follower on Twitter said: Not bad...for a dead guy.