Cons: Piss Poor Officiating
This one has little to do with either team. It is solely on the officiating crew for this particular game.
As Blues fans, we tend to see things threw skewed vision and think the officials are literally against us. There have been plenty of games where that was the case, but surprisingly this was not one of them.
The officials were not bad toward the Blues. They were simply bad, overall.
In the first period, Joel Edmundson was called for interference in front of the goal. While that is how the game is called today, it is disappointing because the Blues have had so many issues actually taking people away from their net. We finally have someone do it and they go to the box.
The penalties called in the second period alone were baffling. Carl Gunnarsson was issued a slashing call where he barely tapped the guy.
The penalty to David Perron was similar too. Perron did not need to reach out and put himself in the spot, but the stick tapped the opponent’s stick just in front of the hands. There was no contact with the body at all and yet they put a Blues man in the sin bin.
Lastly, and most infuriating, was the call against Pat Maroon. First, they put the wrong guy in the box. Even when they corrected it to Maroon, they should have been able to look at the replay and say there was no call, even though that’s against the replay rule.
Maroon reached out and the stick was in the vicinity of his opponent, but the contact only happened by the Hurricane losing his balance and falling into the stick. On the replay, you could see the official was looking a different direction and only put his arm in the air when he saw the Carolina player go down.
That is not how penalties are supposed to be called. If you don’t see it 100%, you should not call it.
On this night, that was clearly not the mantra. In fact, it was the opposite. These refs seemed to think if there was a 1% chance it happened, then it did happen. Hopefully, we do not get this crew again soon or hopefully it was just an off night.