Minor League Hockey Coach Protests Call By Littering Ice With Equipment

For one week, the Louisiana IceGators of the Southern Professional Hockey League were in the news and it was all the result of a meltdown by interim head coach and general manager Brent Sapergia during a 5-4 loss to the Pensacola Ice Flyers on Nov. 6.

Late in the first period, with his team down a pair of goals, Sapergia was riled up over a penalty call against his team and decided the best way to protest would be to throw everything he could get his hands on behind the bench, on the ice.

Water bottles, water coolers, hockey sticks, tape ... it's all there. As you might expect, he was ejected (for the second straight game) for his outburst. Sapergia explained his actions to Greg Wyshynski at Yahoo! sports Puck Daddy blog:

Sapergia feels his actions were justified. The previous night against Pensacola, Sapergia said, he saw two players cut for 20 stitches without any penalties called. Last Friday, the penalties were already 7-2 in favor of the Floridian team in the first period when Sapergia said he saw one of his players take two crosschecks to the head -- one of them when he was without a helmet. The coach demanded a power play from the official, who instead issued a penalty to the IceGators. "At that point I felt our players weren't being protected. Something needed to be done," he said.

The league suspended Sapergia for an "indefinite period of time," and he has since found a new, full-time head coach by hiring John Gibson, who had previously worked for the Huntsville Havoc.

This, of course, brings back memories of former New Jersey Devils head coach, Robbie Ftorek, who threw a bench on the ice against the Detroit Red Wings back in January, 2000.

And as long as we're on the subject of minor league coaches losing their minds, you can never see enough of Phillip Wellman of the Mississippi Braves and his epic meltdown during the summer of 2007.