Goals! Goals! Goals! Are We Having Fun Yet?

Don't be fooled by the 7-6 final score. Game one of the Ottawa-Buffalo series was much more wide open than that.

Featuring six blown leads, three goals in the final 97 seconds of the third period, and an overtime that required one shot, it wasn't exactly classic playoff hockey. It looked more like the "new NHL" as scripted by the Carry On Gang.

Great fun for everybody except goalies, coaches and losers. (Listening to coaches after a game like this one, you begin to think that they don't even like hockey.) But it was also absurd, laughable and incompetent.

We've been hearing for years that the NHL needs more goals, and the rule changes introduced this season were mostly designed to boost scoring. Does that make a wide-open, no-defense, last-shot-wins, 7-6 playoff game the ultimate hockey experience? Over at Canucks Corner, Tom Benjamin hosts a debate on the entertainment value Friday's wild romp: great game or pathetic joke?

Postscript: It's worth noting that many high-scoring hockey games do not include comebacks, lead changes, edge-of-your-seat dramatics or spectacular finishes. That's because the same team keeps scoring all the goals, as the New Jersey Devils and Colorado Avalanche know all too well..