On Thursday night, the Montreal Canadiens took on a rather formidable opponent in Connor McDavid and the Edmonton Oilers. Formidable in their own right, they proved even tougher to beat when the officials decided to join their team.
With the Habs leading 5-3 in the third period, the officials granted Edmonton their second power play of the period with a soft tripping call against Mike Matheson. This one is at least forgivable in the sense that his stick made contact with Connor McDavid, and the latter did fall down. Soft call, and the second such one against Montreal just in that period, but forgivable.
What isn’t forgivable is the patently absurd nature of their next call, which sent the Oilers immediately back to the power play and permitted the tying goal.
I can’t believe a referee can call such a soft penalty on Josh Anderson
— RealJordanLove (@randeylahey7) October 24, 2025
Shooting the puck away in frustration happens EVERY GAME
The refs gave this one to the Oilers#GoHabsGo #LetsGoOilers
pic.twitter.com/3dW9lMIK9D
This does happen every game, is never called, and the only possible reason an official would make this call is if they’re pre-emptively planning a call against that team to begin with. They’re looking for something. This is the kind of call that makes you wonder if they have a parlay that needs to cash out, and the Edmonton money line was the last leg necessary for that to happen.
Brendan Gallagher said after the game that the official who made the call felt that Josh Anderson “showed him up.”
Brendan Gallagher voiced his opinion on the officiating of Thursday night’s game between the Canadiens and Oilers. pic.twitter.com/zUWbQd0BC2
— TSN (@TSN_Sports) October 24, 2025
On the off chance that particular official is reading this, allow me to explain something very important to you; you are not part of the show. Nobody pays to see you. You are there to enforce the rules, not a single one of which say that a player needs to respect your ego after being scored on. It is the most ridiculous explanation of a penalty call I’ve ever heard, and lends itself to the idea that this crew had made up their mind as to who they wanted to win during the second intermission.
The Habs played tentatively from that point on, clearly afraid to make contact with their opponents and give them another opportunity on the power play. The same soft calls that were going against Montreal were not called against Edmonton, and they were able to get the go-ahead goal that the officials obviously wanted them to have.
Folks who listen to my podcast, or have read any of the over 1000 articles I’ve written for this site, know that I have an affinity for complaining about the refs. They also know that I always stay short of outright assigning a Habs loss to those officials. This game is different, and the refs decided in the third period to do everything in their power to give the game to the Oilers. It was an absolute travesty of the game, and every member of the team who spoke out against it after it was over should have their fines covered by Geoff Molson, because they were right.
They deserved to win that game, every even-strength metric suggests that they should have won that game, and Martin St-Louis now has the unenviable task of convincing that group that they shouldn’t change a single thing about the way they played. Geoff Molson shouldn’t just cover the fines, he should board a plane to New York and take the league to task for what was an outright shameful performance by these officials.
We know the league is more likely to levy fines than do anything about it, but this simply can’t be taken lying down.
Click the play button below to listen to your full Bottom Six Minutes, also available wherever you get your podcasts. We’re back following Saturday night’s visit to the Vancouver Canucks, hopefully without officials that have online betting accounts.
