WASHINGTON -- The Penguins didn't lose because of the on-ice officiating.
No, they lost Game 2 of their Stanley Cup playoff series with the Capitals, 4-1, on this Sunday afternoon at Capital One Arena, because they yet again hit the snooze button through the first period, because they failed to register a consistent offensive pulse beyond the Sidney Crosby line, because Matt Murray's glove hand again didn't rise to the occasion -- literally, meaning upward — and because they were eventually bound to miss Evgeni Malkin and Carl Hagelin.
Oh, and I'll throw in not one but two botched replay calls in New York, but that's separate from the referees and linesmen on the scene.
TAP ABOVE FOR BOXSCORETo repeat, this time with gusto, the Penguins didn't lose because of the on-ice officiating.
Now, with that vital disclaimer out of the way ...
That up there is Tom Wilson, Washington's resident thug in the NHL's now mostly thug-less age, doing what he does best in deliberately injuring Brian Dumoulin.
It's 4:26 into the second period, and Alexander Ovechkin has Dumoulin lined up coming from behind the Pittsburgh net. Nothing wrong with that. But Wilson, visibly seeing this, seizes the opportunity to skate up from behind and blast his left shoulder pad into Dumoulin's head.
Watch it again, from three more painful angles:
See the shoulder pop up there?
That's vicious. That's dangerous. That's disrespectful to the game.
That also drew no call.
All four officials on the ice are empowered to call major penalties, and not one of them did, even though the puck had just been in the vicinity and, theoretically, that's where one would be focused if one were watching the game.
Which appeared to be Mike Sullivan's rather pointed message to one of the referees, Gord Dwyer, in holding up four fingers shortly thereafter:
After the game, Sullivan offered no word on Dumoulin's status beyond "upper-body injury," and he declined to confirm the obvious that Dumoulin would have been put through the NHL's concussion protocol.
From this perspective, it sure didn't look good. Dumoulin lay on the ice for nearly a minute and was repeatedly rubbing his eyes, even after athletic trainer Chris Stewart accompanied him off the rink and down the runway. He looked dazed, disoriented.
Given that, plus Dumoulin having been previously diagnosed with a concussion in his career, plus the uncertainty that accompanies any concussion, it's impossible to gauge how long he'll be out.
Here's what's not impossible to gauge: That's got to be a major penalty and a suspension. And since the sequence was entirely missed or ignored here by Dwyer and referee partner Chris Rooney, as well as linesmen Derek Amell and Mark Shewchyk, it's got to be the latter.
And it had better be a whopper.
The Penguins sure seemed to think so.
"He made contact with Dumo's head," Sidney Crosby would say. "That was the first point of contact. Given his history and things like that, I’m sure they’ll take a good look at it."
"We all know what he is and what he does on the ice," Kris Letang would say. "We expect that from him."
Sullivan was asked at the coach's podium if he had an opinion on the hit.
"Yes."
And did he care to share it?
"No."
He also was asked on the bench during the game by NBC, and he replied, "Yeah I saw it, it looked like it was a high hit, but they didn’t see it that way."
Stunningly, his counterpart, Barry Trotz, saw it differently:
More stunningly, Wilson proclaimed his innocence.
"It wasn't a body check to the head," he insisted. "I think I graze his head as I'm skating by him and as he's getting hit by Ovi. If you watch it from multiple angles, you don't see me, like, lunge into his head or anything."
Yeah, dude, we just watched all the angles.
"I'm at no point trying to target the head at all. I'm skating, backchecking, trying to do my job and unfortunately there's a collision there. I've watched it briefly, and I don't realize what I can really do any different. At the last second, I see Ovi coming in and you can see me bracing, as well. I've got to analyze it a little more."
With popcorn?
"Obviously you never want to see a guy go down," Wilson finished. "I'm hoping he's better, and we'll see what happens."
We'll see, indeed.
According to the NHL's ironically monikered Department of Player Safety, now headed by Washington County native George Parros, a former enforcer — can't make this stuff up — any checks that "target the head" are subject to supplemental discipline. That's the wording that's been attached to several suspensions, albeit inconsistently applied. Sometimes, they'll decide based on trying to determine intent. Sometimes, they'll go by the aggressor's history. Sometimes, they'll just shrug and satisfy the dying dinosaur faction of team executives and, you know, just let boys be boys.
But "target the head" is the wording that's been used by Parros, and it was again in a one-game suspension administered April 12 to the Kings' Drew Doughty for this check on the Golden Knights' William Carrier:
Los Angeles’ Drew Doughty suspended one game for an illegal check to the head on Vegas’ William Carrier. https://t.co/oOTey5uuRn
— NHL Player Safety (@NHLPlayerSafety) April 12, 2018
Doughty got only the one game, but he doesn't have history.
Then there's the issue of intent, which the Department of Player Safety must take seriously, since it put out this video nine days ago to try to explain why not all head shots are really head shots:
The Department of Player Safety analyzes four recent hits to explain how we determine if a player’s head is the “main point of contact” https://t.co/FoG3xm6sif
— NHL Player Safety (@NHLPlayerSafety) April 20, 2018
Well, any Wilson scenario oozes history and intent, if only because those tend to be intertwined.
Remember how Matt Cooke never got the benefit of the doubt, primarily because he didn't deserve it?
Wilson doesn't deserve it, either. He's 23 years old, and he's already got 890 career penalty minutes, including 187 in the past regular season alone, and he's been suspended twice, both for malicious checks in preseason exhibitions. The second of those was four games for boarding a St.Louis rookie, Samuel Blais, and Parros appeared to be sending a warning shot that he, unlike his predecessors, meant business.
This mattered, too: In Parros' statement about the second suspension, he wrote: “The onus is on Wilson to deliver a hit in a legal fashion, minimize the impact of the hit or avoid the hit completely.”
Hear that?
"The onus" is on the aggressor. Meaning intent, in a great rarity for this league, wasn't the top priority in the ruling.
Now, Parros was describing a boarding sequence and Wilson having stared down that unsuspecting kid's numbers for far too long. But he unmistakably sees Dumoulin, then drives his shoulder — watch the body motion — into his head.
Intent, history ... it's all there.
Wilson should be gone for the rest of the series. So should Dwyer and Rooney, unless they can explain how neither reacted.
And if the NHL doesn't act on this, let's all raise a toast to the continent's more enterprising lawyers who will someday win that multibillion-dollar suit against Gary Bettman, Bill Daly, Colin Campbell and everyone else at the league level who have long conspired to suppress action on concussions.
None of which will help the Penguins much, of course. Wilson skates on Washington's first line, but that's basically as a piledriver/bouncer for Ovechkin and Evgeny Kuznetsov.
But losing Dumoulin, if that happens, that hurts. Maybe a ton.
"It's tough. He's one of our best defenseman," Sullivan said. "When you lose a guy like that early in the game, you have to find ways to make up for the contributions that he makes. He's an important player for us. It presents a big challenge for the rest of the defensemen."
"We value what Dumo brings us," Jamie Oleksiak said. "That goes without saying."
So should this: Matt Hunwick, who's been a rare bust among Jim Rutherford acquisitions, is next man up.