Rick Bowness’ three lessons for defenceman in the NHL

December 1, 2024

In this edition of X’s and bOnes, former NHL head coach Rick Bowness gives you three lessons for a defenceman using Chris Tanev and Victor Hedman as examples.

NEW YORK — The post-game press conference lasted 1:10 and consisted of six questions that were all responded to with a variation of the same answer from Montreal Canadiens coach Martin St. Louis.

“I loved our game, but I’m not going to talk about the refs,” he said over and over again after the Canadiens lost 4-3 to the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

It didn’t matter if St. Louis was being asked about his team’s performance, or about the undebatable penalty Kirby Dach took for high-sticking with 2:40 to go and with the score knotted at 3-3, he stuck to his mantra.

“Like I said, I loved everything about our game,” St. Louis repeated, “but I’m not going to talk about the refs.”

Well, we are.

Kelly Sutherland and Francis Charron — two of the league’s most tenured and decorated officials, with 2,271 regular-season games of experience and 12 Stanley Cup Final appearances between them — ended up making the difference in one of the most evenly played games of the season, leaving St. Louis and the Canadiens with every reason to be as frustrated as they appeared when all was said and done.

He, and they, couldn’t talk about it without being fined by the NHL. So they chose not to.

But the officials themselves should be forced to talk about it.

Not just these ones on this day, but all officials should be forced to speak after all games in this league.

If not them, the supervisors overseeing each game should be made available to the press to provide clarifications, justifications, or perhaps just a smidgen of accountability for when the job is botched on the level it was in Saturday’s game.

There were several missed calls, and there were too many calls made that were completely inexplicable.

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And in the void left by the NHL’s refusal to have anyone answer for it, we’re left to go with our own interpretations of what happened.

In our view, the misses went both ways, but there were more of them favouring the Rangers than the Canadiens.

Canadiens defenceman Arber Xhekaj threw a late hit on Alexis Lafreniere in the second period, and he completely missed with his shoulder and ended up clipping Lafreniere’s knee. It should’ve been a penalty on Xhekaj, but he escaped punishment while Sam Carrick went to serve two minutes for trying — and failing — to engage Xhekaj in a fight.

But Sutherland and Charron missed a crosscheck from New York’s Chris Kreider on Josh Anderson in the same frame and their biggest miss of the afternoon came on the play that ended up winning the game for the Rangers.

“I think I got tripped,” said Joel Armia.

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Everyone in the building saw that he got tripped by Will Cuylle, who then made his way unimpeded to Montreal’s net to set up the deciding goal for Kappo Kakko with 24 seconds to play.

But somehow, Sutherland and Charron either completely missed it or decided to let it go.

If it was the latter, it was one of several curious decisions they made in this game.

One of the more egregious ones was the roughing penalty to Anderson, which was assessed in the 17^th minute of the second period — or several minutes after he complained to the officials for missing the cross-check he took from Kreider.

Mika Zibanejad put the Rangers up 3-1 just 49 seconds later.

And then, in the 19^th minute of the second period, came the most bizarrely sorted situation of the game. Kirby Dach pushed Zibanejad into Rangers goaltender Jonathan Quick and Quick came up swinging, leading to an 11-player melee.

It took Sutherland and Charron roughly 10 minutes to figure out who to penalize before sending three players from each side to the box — none of them being Dach — and (seemingly) arbitrarily deciding the Rangers should get a power play out of it.

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They gave Juraj Slafkovsky two penalties for roughing on the sequence but left everyone in the building guessing as to how the Rangers came out of it all with a five-on-four advantage.

NHL protocol is for one of the two officials to use the microphones they’re wearing to announce the penalties they’re handing out to the crowd, but neither official did that after the absurdly long delay, and confusion ensued, with the league’s website reading the double-minor was being given to Xhekaj before it was eventually correctly attributed to Slafkovsky.

The whole thing was a mockery, and there was nobody around to explain afterwards.

St. Louis was certainly going to be asked about it, but he didn’t even wait for a question about officiating before saying — and repeating several times — he loved the way the Canadiens played and wasn’t going to talk about the officiating.

The Canadiens’ effort was strong from start to finish, with Anderson setting the tone by landing a decisive win over Jacob Trouba in a first-period fight. They fought back hard to tie the game 3-3 in the third period, with goals from Cole Caufield and Nick Suzuki putting them in position to at least earn a point in the standings.

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St. Louis might not have loved the penalty Dach took on Zibanejad, which came from behind the Rangers net.

But he definitely hated that Armia had no chance of recovering from Cuylle’s trip on time to deny Kakko the winning goal.

The big Finnish winger said he asked for an explanation from the officials, and then said, “I didn’t get much of an answer.”

We never get any answers from them, which is something the NHL should change.

The NFL makes officials available to a pool reporter, who gathers questions and asks them on behalf of the press. Major League Baseball does the same.

It’s all done with the understanding that officials are human, and that they’re never going to call a perfect game.

But at least they’re given the chance to own it when they call one poorly.

This game, which saw both teams go toe-to-toe all afternoon, was called terribly, and St. Louis said what he had to say about that without saying anything at all.

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Rick Bowness’ three lessons for defenceman in the NHL

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