Can a speaker problem cause the receiver to overload/switch off?

[Musashi]

My friend and I have been running some AV experiments in light of recent bugs.

Story thus far: During Rock Band, the receiver switched off suddenly. Retries caused the same. We were about to pack up the receiver for repair, but we tried a few things.

We put the front speakers in to my old receiver and during playback it would say 'Overload' and cut the sound, would power off and back on again. The next test was to disconnect one speaker and try to isolate the problem, we found the left speaker was weak and continued to cause the overload shut off but not the right. Then it was decided that it may have been a blown speaker. We reconnected my VSX94 (Pioneer) again without the left speaker and it withstood high volumes and had no shutoff issues as of yet. My friend, though, had an idea and checked the back of the left speaker that was causing this problem and noticed that the negative wire was touching the positive terminal, so he rewired the back of the left speaker so that the negative wire no longer touched the positive terminal. It sounds good again, and we're in the midst of testing Rock Band again. So far, so good.

It was concluded that the negative wire on the back of the speaker began touching the positive terminal after the speaker was moved to get an old device out of the cabinet next to the speaker.

All in all, sharing some knowledge, and curiously asking how speaker wire can affect the receiver.