On Thursday, Tampa Bay’s Dominic Moore took the Rangers’ Rusian Fedotenko out of the lineup with the assault depicted above ; with the former escaping suspension, The New York Post’s Larry Brooks says of NHL player safety cop Brendan Shanahan, “you do have to wonder how different the NHL brand of justice would be if the chief disciplinarian were a former player whose career had been ended by a brain injury.”

Yup, it was the stick, not the shoulder that caused the injury. Nothing in the jurist’s manual about suspending a stick.

I’m fairly certain I saw something similar on “Law & Order” once where a woman was killed when hit by a car after being chased into the highway by a man carrying a gun, but in that case, the car wasn’t found guilty — the guy with the gun was convicted by Jack McCoy (or was it Ben Stone?).

The chance Moore’s act was unintentional and accidental is next to nil, given that he had been driven into the wall moments earlier by Fedotenko on the same shift, an act that could have drawn a boarding penalty without much cause for complaint from the Rangers.

Seconds after not getting the call, Moore put Fedotenko down at 3:05 of the third period as the Rangers player moved into a checking posture behind him in the circle while the puck was on another player’s stick.

Only an individual twisting himself into knots looking for coincidence would believe it was. This, by the way, is what it can look like when players police the game themselves, if those who call for vigilante justice are paying attention.