Milan Lucic fined $5000 for groin spear, points out he only does this once every 2.3 years

It's been a nutty start to the NHL playoffs, as for the second straight day, the NHL has handed out a fine for a testicle-related incident.

Just one day after Joel Quenneville was left reaching for his wallet for reaching just left of his wallet, Milan Lucic of the Boston Bruins was dinged $5000 for dinging Danny DeKeyser with a stick to the de keysers during Friday night's series opener between Boston and Detroit. Here's another look:

The league called it spearing. That seems generous.

Lucic also defended his own honour by pointing to his relatively clean record, which is customary in Boston:

Lucic: "I’ve been in the league for seven years and I think I’ve only done that three times. I don’t know why I did it.” — Ansar Khan (@AnsarKhanMLive) April 19, 2014

The man has a point. He's only averaging one cheap, cowardly crotch shot every 2.3 years. If he has a 15-year career, he's only going to do this three or four more times. That's it. Seems like an honorable player to me.

Lucic wasn't the only one defending Lucic, absurdly enough. Since he plays in Boston, he had his local defenders. From Boston.com:

Though many will bemoan Milan Lucic's grape-busting stick work on Detroit's Danny DeKeyser in the second period of Game 1, the simple fact is that in the Stanley Cup Playoffs the ends do justify the means.

Of course, most incidents like this aren't caught on camera, and most aren't perpetrated by someone as widely disliked as Milan Lucic, but anyone who has ever laced a pair knows how much cheap stuff behind the play can take an opponent off their game.

Let's move on.

You'll note that $5k is one-fifth of what Joel Quenneville received for grabbing his own package, so the lesson here is simple: it is five times worse to attack your opponent's junk than your own. Be excellent to one another, but be especially excellent to yourself.

Or perhaps the league feels Lucic was influenced by Quenneville, who is an authority figure. Who deserves more punishment? The kids that went over the cliff, or the pied piper than led them there? Look what you've done with your pipe-pieng, Quenneville. Stop pieing your pipe.

In all seriousness, though, Quenneville's fine was more because the CBA limits the fines for players in a way that it doesn't for coaches. The max fine for Lucic's incident was only $10,000. The fines were also handed out by different arms of the league. The Department of Player Safety handles player incidents, but not coach incidents.

But it's still fun to compare these two moments, disingenuous as it is, because they share a common thread, and that thread is gonads.