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The Bruins-Leafs game tonight was a tremendously entertaining game.
End-to-end action, plenty of post-whistle scrums, some big hits, some rough stuff...everything you’d expect a late-season game with huge playoff implications to be.
The refs were letting pretty much everything go in the second and third periods: chops, slashes, shoves...you name it, it was ignored (both ways).
If that’s the way you’re going to call the game, how do you make a penalty call like this in the final three minutes?
(Excuse the potato quality, but it gets the point across.)
THAT is a penalty?!
Dominic Moore and Nikita Soshnikov are in the same weight class. They’re battling for position in front of the net. Soshnikov is looking directly at Moore when the two players come together, so it’s not like this was a blindside hit.
Soshnikov gotten bodied by a stronger, better-positioned Moore and went down like a ton of bricks, immediately looking to the ref for a call, palms in the air.
That he got it, especially after being given a mere two minutes for shoving Patrice Bergeron face-first into the boards in the first, borders on absurd.
That penalty isn’t the sole reason the Bruins lost this game: Frederik Andersen was great, the Leafs’ power play got the job done and the Leafs’ youth/speed had them buzzing the Bruins’ cage all night.
However, with the game on the line and the whistles firmly planted in pockets for the majority of the game, that’s a tough call to go against you.
What do you think?
Right call? Wrong call?