St. Louis Blues: More Lame Supplemental Discipline On Ivan Barbashev

The NHL continues to punish the St. Louis Blues for offenses the in-game officials did not see as being that terrible. Ivan Barbashev is the latest to suffer.

Stop me if you have heard this one before. The St. Louis Blues are on the short end of a decision coming from Toronto.

The Blues are used to not getting favorable calls from the league office regarding offsides or goal challenges. In the Stanley Cup Final, St. Louis has now been punished, after the fact, for hits that were merely questionable and not really as awful as most would have you believe.

The first one to get bounced from the series for this was Oskar Sundqvist. This was a huge decision by the NHL because Sundqvist was one of the Blues biggest penalty killers. It is no coincidence that Boston scored on four power plays in the game Sundqvist was out of.

Now, Ivan Barbashev will be forced to sit for a potential Cup-clinching Game 6.

The Blues have now lost two players to suspension in the Stanley Cup Final after not having anyone suspended all season long.

The problem fans in blue have with this is not the idea that these hits were not questionable. Even Blues fans, not all but some, will admit that both hits were dangerous and could have injured players and did in the case of Sundqvist.

That said, the issue from our eyes is intent vs. responsibility. The league seems to suspend players based on perceived intent, thus giving ammunition to this false notion that the Blues are dirty.

The suspensions also refuse to place any responsibility on the player that got hit. The case against the Sundqvist suspension has already been laid out. Matt Grzelyck turned himself from an already committed hit, putting himself in danger.

A similar comment could be made on the hit against Marcus Johansson. Barbashev has already committed to the hit and Johansson stays low, having reached for the puck, leaving himself in a prone position.

I do not question the idea that the hit is questionable. However, the officials did not deem it worthy of a penalty in real time and suddenly the league wants to take a player out for a pivotal game.

From the Blues perspective, this irks fans because it comes across as though nothing might have happened after the fact if the refs called the penalty in the first place. It also furthers this false narrative that the Blues are head hunting.

Despite what Bruins fans want to believe, the Blues are not a dirty team. In fact, they were penalized less than Boston was.

If the NHL truly believes this is a dirty hit, so be it. However, we have seen these hits countless times with supplemental discipline spotty, at best.

Blues fans are not unrealistic. We see things through tinted glasses, like all fans, but also like all fans we just want things called the same for all.

From the team perspective, the reason this hurts is Barbashev has been another key cog on the penalty kill, like Sundqvist. He is a tireless worker and has led the team in hits through the postseason.

He has only averaged a little over 12 minutes of ice time in the playoffs, so in theory his time is not hard to replace. The reality is that you not only have to replace him in the roster, but find someone who can kill penalties too. That did not work very well when Sundqvist went out and the PK unit got spread out rather quickly.

Time will tell how this one impacts this series. All we know now is the Blues have one more piece of adversity to come.