Simply put, it was an accident. No one should point fingers or blame anyone. It was an accident.

On Sunday night, as Panthers' Olli Jokinen had stumbled over a Sabres player, his right skate came up and cut his teammate Richard Zednik's neck as he was skating in behind the play. Zednik stumbled over Jokinen and headed straight to the bench with his hand over his neck and a trail of blood behind him. The medical trainer was there to put a towel to his neck as fellow teammate Jassen Cullimore helped him off the ice.

Just as soon as Zednik stepped foot onto the bench, he collapsed into the trainer as he was carried off to the locker room to be attended to by the medical staff in the Sabres arena.

''It's something you never want to see,'' his teammate Stephen Weiss said choked up. ``It's the worst thing I've ever seen in hockey. The worst went through my mind. . . . Just his face [when he was] coming off [the ice], was just, you know, something you don't want to see. I don't know how to explain it, but it was a scary look. He looked very scared.''

''I walked in and saw him on the stretcher,'' Panthers' goalie Tomas Vokoun said. ``I was very concerned when he came off. He was obviously very scared. He was conscious, I guess, that's what the trainer said. His eyes were closed, but he was moving and moaning.''

As Zednik was attended to by the medical doctors in the arena, hockey fans throughout HSBC Arena stood in shock looking at the three puddles of blood and the trail of blood to the locker room. The players, fans and NHL staff said their own silent prayers for Zednik as they awaited word on what would happen next.

"I saw the whole thing, one of the worst things I've ever seen in hockey," said Sabres goaltender Ryan Miller, who was about 20 feet away from the incident. "I saw Jokinen's skate going up, so it was kind of like a car crash. I had to keep watching.

"I saw it, and it looked like a Quentin Tarantino movie. I don't know. I don't want to see anymore of that."

Olli Jokinen had no idea at first that it was his skate that had lacerated his teammate's neck.

''Blood was kind of flying out of his throat and I was right there,'' said Jokinen, Florida's captain. ``I've never seen anything like it. It's very scary."

When word came that Zednik had stabilized, the fans throughout the Sabres arena gave Zednik a standing ovation. NHL's disciplinarian Colin Campbell was in attendance to watch his son, Gregory, play for the Panthers. He made the decision that the game would continue, even though the players just weren't in the game anymore.

``If it would have been my call," Jokinen said. "I would have gone to the hospital with him. There's a lot of things bigger than hockey.''

Zednik had emergency surgery at Buffalo General Hospital and was listed in stable condition in the Intensive Care Unit on Monday morning.

[Source: Buffalo News and Miami Herald]