Someone else is in Larry Brooks’ corner when it comes to the nuevo NHL. From the Detroit Free Press’ Helene St. James.

Red Wings captain Steve Yzerman (above) has played 13 games in the new-rules NHL. He would like to see some of the old NHL back.

“Everybody keeps saying this is great. It’s not great,” Yzerman said. “It’s not hockey.”

Yzerman spoke in the visitor’s room at Rexall Place just minutes after the Wings had suffered a 6-5 overtime loss that left them winless in their past three games.

“There are penalties all over,” he said. “I’ll just use Mathieu Schneider’s penalty as an example. He steps up and takes his guy out, and his stick gets caught and the crowd cheers so the referee puts his hand up. There has to be some discretion. The referees have to use some judgment on what is a penalty and what is not. They’ve taken judgment out of it and I think it’s somewhat made it easy on the referees just to call anything, because there is no judgment.

“Good referees used to have good judgment. Now they’ve taken that out of the game. I’m not saying I’m blaming the referees for it, I just feel the whole thing has to be adjusted and they have to look at this seriously. They can’t continue to call irrelevant things that have no business being called.”

Courtesy of a first-period goal each from Martin Straka and Michael Nylunder, the Rangers are leading Carolina 3-1 midway through their matinee at MSG. Peter Prucha just scored a power-play goal off a nice feed from Jaromir Jagr. Marek Malik is having some difficulty staying on the ice —- Steve Yzerman might describe it as a battle against irrelevancy.