Friday night's St. Louis-Detroit game featured one of the worst decisions by a officiating staff you can imagine. And it reminds of what I wrote from last Saturday's post regarding the Sharks' win over Colorado and Brad Stuart's vicious hit of Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog. Stuart slammed into Landeskog with a fierce open-ice check. Landeskog left the game, came back and played 18 more minutes at San Jose but then missed the next couple games. He was placed on injured reserve on Friday. While Avalanche Coach Joe Sacco thought the hit was illegal (Landeskog by the way thought it was a legal hit), not only was Stuart not suspended, he didn't even draw a minor penalty for charging. This is what I wrote before NHL disciplinary poobah Brendan Shanahan decided not to suspend Stuart:
Was it a suspendable offense? Maybe. But like in the NFL, I've always had problems with players being suspended for an excessive hit even when they were not being penalized in the game.
Fast forward to the Blues-Red Wings game. St. Louis captain David Backes took down former Shark Kent Huskins with a big hit in the third period that sent Huskins to the bench in some major pain. Within a few seconds, Backes was kicked out of the game with a match penalty for, and this is was the announcement by the referee, "an illegal hit to the head". Television replays and the big screen at Joe Louis Arena seemed to indicate anything but contact to the head was made. So to draw a match penalty for illegal contact to the head, was insane.
In the ultimate, we-screwed-you-guys-but-sorry-for-the-mixup mea culpa, the NHL informed Backes he won't face any further charges, not to mention there won't be a record of his match penalty in the books. Not that it will help St. Louis' bitterness considering Detroit went on to defeat the Backes-less Blues 5-3. Pavel Datsyuk scored the game-winning goal on the ensuing five-minute power play. But it's a lesson learned. The Blues lost their captain for a hit that at worst was a two-minute penalty. The Avs lost their captain for an extended period of time for what objectively looked like a much worse hit by the Sharks' Stuart, who went completely unpunished. I'm not usually a complainer of officiating. Bad calls usually affect every team at one point or another. But what happened to Backes was inconsistency if not incompetence at its worst.
And here's the Backes hit to make your own deduction on where this ranks on the Worst. Call. Ever. scale (Ken Hitchcock's reply, which sure looked like "You've got be @#$%%^ kidding me!" was a fitting description:
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