Top NHL Draft Prospect Gets Suspended For Launching A Teddy Bear Back Into The Crowd During Teddy Bear Toss Night
If there's one hockey league in North America that doesn't mess around when it comes to dishing out some discipline, it's the OHL. This is a league that suspended a player last season for 5 games just for calling another player a pussy.
I can't imagine how long the OHL Rulebook is, because it seems like they just got bored one day and started writing as many rules as humanly possible. One of those rules being that you can't shoot objects out of the playing surface. Now to be fair to the OHL, we've seen this rule have to be enforced before in the ECHL when a player was given a 10-minute misconduct for shooting a chicken nugget into the crowd after some little twerp threw it on the ice.
The OHL decided to just take this rule a little further, and opted for a 1-game suspension over just a 10-minute misconduct for shooting objects out of the playing surface. And this time it was Michael Misa who was the guilty culprit.
Michael Misa is about to be a top 5 pick in the upcoming NHL Draft. He's one of only 9 players to ever be granted "exceptional status" to play in one of the 3 CHL leagues at just 15 years old. John Tavares, Aaron Ekblad, Connor McDavid, Sean Day, Joe Veleno, Shane Wright, Connor Bedard, and Landon DuPont are the others. The first 3 players who were granted exceptional status all went on to be 1st overall picks. It's been a bit of a crapshoot after that. But Michael Misa is definitely going to hear his name get called within the first hour of the 2025 NHL Draft.
That is, of course, if any team can ever forgive him for the heinous act of shooting an object out of the playing surface. And it wasn't just any object. It was a teddy bear. On the night of the Teddy Bear Toss in Sarnia.
In case you're unfamiliar with the Teddy Bear Toss, it's a promotion that a bunch of junior and minor league hockey teams do during the holidays. Everyone shows up to the game with a bunch of teddy bears, and then they all launch them on the ice after the home team scores their first goal. Then all the teddy bears are donated to a local children's hospital or something along those lines.
So basically what we're getting at here is that Michael Misa hates little sick kids. He doesn't want them to have a happy holiday. He wants those little kids to stay sick and miserable forever. A 1-game suspension barely feels like a slap on the wrist. It's like they forgot to add the '0' after the 1. Really makes you question his character, and if he's someone that your organization would want to have anything to do with. Personally I think teams would be crazy to take him with a top 5 pick in next summer's draft. If anything, he should drop to around wherever the Philadelphia Flyers are picking first.