Yeah, except this time with the excuse that he was just "getting back up to game speed." A number of mishandled pucks, some opportunities wasted when he waited too long to shoot and had the puck poked away, but no dumb minor penalties! Progress!
They are supposed to extract a penalty for taking out a star player with an illegal hit (doesn’t matter if it’s shoulder to shoulder when the player wasn’t eligible to be hit), and they’re certainly supposed to prevent the meathead from running around trying to lay more hits in the next period. Neither occurred.
So they end up pissed off and play their A+ game against us on Friday?
This was the thing that annoyed me most about Johnston. I get that people want revenge, but to me, that's counter-productive in a close a game if it's done wrong. Gudas laid a great open-ice hit after Carlsson got hurt - THAT'S the way it should be done. Your mileage may vary.
I agree with initiating more hits, but I don’t think Ross played much after the incident in a close game. Hopefully the incident will be addressed early tomorrow, and not just with Ross hugging Oleksiak.
It’s dirty because of the location. Sending someone into the goalpost is similar to sending someone into the boards. At that distance, they don’t have the ability to protect themselves. If that happened at mid-ice, it’s a standard 2 minutes.
The location of the hit matters, too. Like when someone gets checked near the boards. I definitely don’t think it was worthy of a suspension or anything, but I also wouldn’t say it was totally clean.
I know exactly what okay you’re talking about, because I yelled out “hit someone already, stop with the drive-byes”.
So what's the call on that, then? The interference call was a reach, IMO. You hit a guy dangerously into the boards, its boarding. What do you call a clean hit into the post? I don't understand what the ref is supposed to call there.
I agree that it’s borderline interference but just because there isn’t an obvious penalty call for it doesn’t mean it isn’t dirty.
Well, besides the tragedy of Leo being injured...
He still looked pretty good, IMO. And way outplayed his linemates by the chart (plus having over 50% of the team's takeaways, which, yikes? Of course two were on the same PK shift).
Our future of the franchise was laying motionless on the ice. I don’t care how clean people think the hit was, the person responsible for this should be taught a lesson. Gudas shouldn’t of waited for an acceptance of a fight, he should’ve just went. take the penalty (they did anyway but didn’t get their moneys worth) and finish the game hard. Instead nobody did anything of note to the jackass and they even got softer. As mentioned by a few other posters you could see guys like Ross Johnston miss perfect opportunities to lay out people.
Correct. I remember it was about Lindholm saying he was hard to play with.
Nope, it was said his partners said it. I do not remember there was a single name called out. But I remember it was plural.
Yeah, it feels like he's trying to keep up with the pace but unfortunately that's not where his strengths are. He's still pretty much useless if/when he can keep up with the pace. He must've been told to play this way but that just doesn't make any sense. Why is he in the lineup then?
