Saturday night is absolutely not what you want to see in the preseason. The Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs are trying to get ready for their respective seasons, and it turned into a complete gongshow due in large part to the officials not doing their jobs. It all started pretty early in the first period, thanks to an illegal knee.
Already down David Reinbacher in the game, the Habs lost Patrik Laine thanks to this gutless play from Cedric Paré.
This isn’t accidental. Paré is beat to the inside and sticks his knee out to stop Laine from getting past him. Full stop. Anyone defending this is willfully ignorant, or they want to live in a world where defencemen can do this to forwards whenever they want to save face. Orthopedic surgeons will be thrilled if it’s the latter, but I suspect that most hockey players won’t love the rulebook being thrown in the trash at the expense of their knees. Whether Paré’s intent was to injure Laine is impossible to prove, but the result is still the same either way, and there is a strong case for a major penalty and a game misconduct. The refs chose to call absolutely nothing on the play.
And from that moment, the game was a complete mess, and a dangerous one at that.
I don’t like the punches to the back of the head from Arber Xhekaj here, but the rage that fueled them is understandable. He just watched his teammate potentially have his season ended, not so much as a minor penalty on the play, and then the culprit turtles from the fight. Paré shouldn’t have been in the game at this point, so this legitimately can’t happen if the refs did their job properly.
Juraj Slafkovsky and Josh Anderson both ended up in fights. There were scrums after nearly every whistle in either of the end zones. These things happen in hockey games, but the risks associated with these things happening that often in a preseason game just aren’t worth it. They’re lucky nobody else ended up getting seriously injured on either side.
Officials should be reprimanded for a game like that. If they make the right call on Paré in the first period, at the very least, the temperature of that game would have been a lot more manageable.