Anybody With A Brain Can Tell You Jeremy Swayman Wasn't Coming Close To Stopping That Sam Bennett Goal Regardless
Steve Babineau. Getty Images.Video review has done irreversible damage on how we watch sports. Everybody's a goddamn rules expert now that you can slow the video down to a million frames per second, and have 40 different crystal clear camera angles on a single play. We used to wake up in the morning to throw on SportsCenter as fast as we could to watch the best highlights from the night before in sports. Now all we do is overanalyze screenshots to talk about whether or not a team got screwed over. Everybody in the world complains and whines too much to begin with, and video review is just another opportunity to do it some more.
We were a great nation when common sense ruled supreme. We were a great nation when sports fans could just use the eye test to assess everything. We didn't need to take college level calculus courses to understand analytics which tell us if a player is good or not, we just knew. We didn't need a $750,000 camera on NFL sidelines to tell us if a player made a catch or not, we just knew. And we certainly didn't need any video review to tell us that even if Sam Bennett didn't launch Charlie Coyle into Jeremy Swayman on this goal last night, that puck was still ending up in the back of the net.
Now listen. I get it. The rules say that if a player is pushed into his own goalie by an attacking player, that should technically wipe the goal off the board.
But there is where grammar really comes into play here for the NHL rulebook. Because you see it say "and if necessary a penalty assessed to the attacking player and if a goal is scored it would be disallowed". There's a very important comma that is either missing in that part of the rule, or it is left out intentionally. Because the way that it's written right now, it seems like the only time the goal would be disallowed is if there's a penalty attached to it. And assessing the penalty isn't always necessary in this situation. So if the refs reviewed the play and determined that there was no penalty to assess Sam Bennett? Well then there's no need to take the goal off the board.
The shove wasn't deserving of a penalty. And even if Charlie Coyle ended up preventing Swayman from playing his position, it still wasn't going to be the position that stopped that puck from going in the net. You can use the eye test for that one. I'm just thankful the NHL decided all the cameras they have in the building are worthless and decided to just go with their gut on this one. It's nice to see common sense prevail.
Oh, and if we want every little call to be made strictly by the book then hopefully Boston fans are complaining about Swayman not getting a slashing penalty here on Tkachuk.
Go Cats.