Getty ImagesWhen it comes to issues of player safety in the NHL, there always needs to be a flashpoint moment to spark the debate.

Hybrid icing gets a look when someone’s seriously injured on the end boards. The head injuries to Marc Savard and Sidney Crosby led us to Rule 48.

Now, it’s the horrific eye injury to the New York Rangers’ Marc Staal that’s leading to a serious, potentially final, debate on visors.

The NHLPA has been polling its membership on visors for weeks. The results will be passed along to the players’ competition committee, which could approve new action on visors from the NHL.

According to Elliotte Friedman, the three options on the visor question are:

- Don’t change anything

- Grandfather them in

- Make them mandatory for all, immediately.

“After talking to some players, I think it’s going to be the biggest number ever for grandfathering. The question is whether that number is big enough for anything to change,” said Friedman.

At this point, it’s hard to imagine ‘grandfathering’ in mandatory visors isn’t going to happen.

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Not being one to complain about the quality of officiating in an NHL game, or lack thereof, it was very strange to see the events of Saturday night's Eastern Conference Final Game 1 unfold as they did.

The Pittsburgh Penguins are, we would all agree, the better team in the series when it comes purely to playing the sport of hockey, and few gave the Boston Bruins too much of a chance to advance to their second Stanley Cup Final in three years, with just one caveat. If they could agitate the Penguins into "playing their game," rather than that which Pittsburgh prefers, they at least had a chance. So far, so good.

The Penguins, who spent much of this season loath to be drawn into these types of incidents, were very much dismayed by the Bruins' behind-the-play rough stuff and insistence on finishing every check, and this issue was only exacerbated when David Krejci scored an ugly goal against the run of play midway through the first.

The Penguins had, to that point, not spent too much time actually trailing on home ice; they lost a pair of home games to the Islanders but apart from third-period goals, the amount of actual minutes spent behind on the scoreboard was minimal. They looked uncomfortable being down that early, and not having a way to answer back within less than a minute or two, as they had previously.

It was no real surprise that this situation, coupled with the Bruins' continual work along the boards to finish every check with as much authority as possible, caused things to come to a head early in the second. Just 1:38 in, Matt Cooke confirmed what every living-in-the-past Boston media member and fan has been saying about him: He hasn't changed at all. The five-and-a-game he got for running Adam McQuaid was well-deserved, regardless of how long the Bruins' defenseman, who has a history of concussions, lay prone on the ice, possibly (probably) trying to draw a call.

The refs did the only thing they could do there; and though the call was controversial in the greater Pittsburgh area, they at least tried, at that point, to keep things from boiling over. They did the opposite when Brad Marchand ran James Neal from behind in a not-so-similar situation about 10 minutes later. Marchand, who should have a status as a dirty player just as extreme as Cooke's if not worse, only got two for boarding. And that was when the game went completely out of control.

Sidney Crosby is right that the officials allowed things to escalate in that game, but shockingly went without mentioning the role the wound-up Penguins had in proceedings.

Marchand could have gotten five as well, and the only people who would be mad about it, really, were Bruins fans and players, who wouldn't have found the irony in their complaints about Matt Cooke if you drew them a map. That he didn't was what led directly to the Jarome Iginla/Chris Kelly run-in that in turn provided the impetus for the Crosby/Zdeno Chara/Tuukka Rask incident and the Evgeni Malkin/Patrice Bergeron fight. All of it stupid, all of it ultimately pointless.

Those hard feelings didn't go away in the third period, despite the refs letting everything but an innocuous Crosby slash on Tyler Seguin very late in the proceedings go without raising their eyebrows. And from all the talk immediately following the game, it seems as though the Penguins are feeling hard done by in all this.

(Again, there is inherent irony that Pittsburgh is the team that finds itself complaining about officiating going against it, but here we are.)

And one has to wonder what that means for tonight's Game 2.

Late in the third period of Game 2 on Sunday night, and with this team down three goals, Kyle Clifford of the Los Angeles Kings decided to send a message to Chicago Blackhawks star Jonathan Toews. Behind the play, Clifford tangled with Toews and struck him in the face with a few gloved punches.

Who would dare step up and rescue the captain in this moment of peril? Why, his goaltender of course.

Watch as Corey Crawford steps up with a WWE-quality headlock during the Blackhawks’ 4-2 Western Conference Final victory:

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Here’s how Crawford saw it:

“Yeah, well, their guy grabbed him, got a couple of free shots. So I figured it was enough. Just decided to go in there and grab his head.”

That he did.

Toews seemed appreciative after the game:

“That was great, that was great. I was pretty much laughing. It was one of those moments after the play when you could defiantly hear the crowd respond.

“He’s so competitive in all the areas. Obviously he didn’t like seeing me take a few shots there, so he thought he’d step in. It was a great moment.”

For the record, Crawford does have a HockeyFights.com page.

No. 1 Star: Patrick Sharp, Chicago Blackhawks

Sharp had two assists in the Blackhawks' 4-2 win, setting up Bryan Bickell and Michal Handzus two minutes apart as Chicago doubled their lead midway through the second.

No. 2 Star: Andrew Shaw, Chicago Blackhawks

Shaw got the Blackhawks off to an ideal start, scoring the first goal 1:56 into the first period.

Then he spent the rest of the game being his usual, aggravating self. Shaw finished with 5 hits, second on the Blackhawks only to Michal Rozsival.

The bad news for the LA Kings began in warmup, when Mike Richards, hit by Dave Bolland late in Game 1 but pronounced "fine" by Darryl Sutter just hours before Game 2, felt less than fine during the pregame skate. In the end, he wasn't ready to go after all.

Neither was the rest of his team, as it turned out.

The result: by the time the Kings woke up, they were trailing by four, and Jonathan Quick was on the bench. The Chicago Blackhawks put the "LA Kings" in "shellacking" Sunday night, administering a humbling beatdown of the defending Cup champs in a 4-2 Game 2 victory that wasn't as close as the final score indicated.

Chicago got on the board less than two minutes in, as the Blackhawks forced a turnover and worked the puck to the stick of Viktor Stalberg. A nifty backhand feed later, Andrew Shaw found himself alone in front of Jonathan Quick, and he made sure Stalberg got the assist a slick pass like that deserved. 1-0 Chicago.

Things got worse for the Kings when Brent Seabrook doubled the lead inside the final minute of the first, sending LA to the dressing room down two.

Midway through the second period, the Blackhawks had doubled it again.

If you're wondering, Mike Richards is "fine", according to Darryl Sutter. He'll play in Game 2.

Late in the Blackhawks' Game 1 win over the Kings, Dave Bolland levelled Richards on a high hit (arguably made a little higher by Bolland making like a lord at Christmas and leaping). But Richards, like Bolland, who received no supplemental discipline on the hit, is none the worse for wear.

The Kings aren't dwelling on the hit, either. "I  really have nothing to say about it," Sutter said. "It's not an issue."

That's reasonable. There are, of course, more pressing issues at hand than responding to Bolland's hit, like, say, responding to the loss that came shortly after it. If the Kings can't do that, they'll find themselves going back to LA down two games to none.

Part of that response has to do with making their hits, not their opponent's, the talking point.

Getty ImagesThe first goal Tomas Vokoun surrendered in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Final on Saturday night deflected off of his Pittsburgh Penguins teammate Paul Martin through his five hole, after the Pens left the Bruins’ leading scorer David Krejci unmarked in the slot.

The second goal Vokoun gave up was on a Krecji blast from point blank range; a shot he saved but one that produced a sky-high rebound that the Bruins player tucked home.

The third goal Vokoun gave up was a layup for Nathan Horton, capping the 3-0 Bruins win. If you were to pin that loss on Vokoun, you’d swear he kicked the puck to an open Bruins player. If you sympathize with Vokoun in Game 1, you might argue that the blame on this one goes to the five black sweaters to his left, leaving Horton wide open.

Was Vokoun good in Game 1? Absolutely not. Was he average? We’d say below it. As former NHL goaltender and TSN analyst Jamie McLennan wrote, Vokoun “looked uncomfortable and shaky all game long. He also had some issues again with post plays and shots/plays in his feet.”

There are reasons for concern after one game, for Vokoun and for the Penguins. But are they enough to sit Vokoun in Game 2?

No, they’re not. Consider what he’s done to start Game 1 of the conference final. And then consider the alternative.

Getty ImagesOne of the most indelible images from the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Eastern Conference Final Game 1 loss to the Boston Bruins was Zdeno Chara craning his neck like a brontosaurus eating low-hanging fruit, getting in the face of Sidney Crosby as the two barked at each other after the second period ended.

Thankfully for Sid, his jaw and anything in low Earth orbit that it would have hit had Chara nailed him with a haymaker there, the situation didn’t escalate.

However, the Penguins captain believes the on-ice officials did allow plenty to escalate in Game 1, as the Bruins agitated Pittsburgh players with no recourse.

Via Shelly Anderson of the Post-Gazette, Crosby’s comments on the officiating:

"They're letting a lot go out there, and the more it gets like that, the more it’s going to escalate. You can only control and channel that stuff so much. You keep letting guys do that stuff, you’re just going to push the envelope.

"That’s something we obviously want to stay away from, but it’s kind of a natural thing when it gets like that."

The first ingredient for the Bruins’ recipe of success was getting under the Penguins’ skin and agitating the hell out of them. As you can read in Crosby’s comments and see here, mission accomplished in their Game 1 win: