It's No Goal...

A night doesn't seem to go by in the NHL anymore, where we can have a slate of games and have zero controversy. It's pretty crazy, if you ask me. On Wednesday night, the Washington Capitals appeared to have scored on a broken play, which resulted in a massive pile-up in front of Carey Price and the Montreal crease. The signal was initially called a goal, but after a consultation with all of the officials, the goal was called back and no penalty was assessed on the play, leading to the cries for some justification as to why the goal was called back.



Now, my initial thought was tweeted as soon as the goal was scored, saying "How was that legal," and thankfully, I thought, it wasn't counted in the end. I honestly thought it was the right call to wave off, just for general sake that Carey Price had no way of making a play for the puck after the initial save, regardless of whether or not Ovechkin was the one who hit him or if he pushed Hal Gill in. Upon further looks at the YouTube clip above, I still stand by that and the rules do back that up, in a roundabout way.

Thanks to Kyle R. on Twitter for having the rule up on his feed this morning to help back-up the referee's decision.

Rule 69.1, within the first paragraph reads:

Goals should be disallowed only if: (1) an attacking player, either by his positioning or by contact, impairs the goalkeeper’s ability to move freely within his crease or defend his goal; or (2) an attacking player initiates intentional or deliberate contact with a goalkeeper, inside or outside of his goal crease.

See how the second point was italicized? That's because it's important to the argument.

After the puck had been initially stopped by Carey Price, the puck was loose in front of the net and Hal Gill was about to play the puck. Alex Ovechkin took notice of Gill's intent to play the puck and chose to play the body instead of the puck, which is fair game. Unfortunately, the contact initiated by Ovechkin, sent Gill into Price, making contact with the goalkeeper and when the puck went with the collision, it would then be deemed unstoppable.

Frankly, I don't see how there could be much of an argument, because that's pretty straight-forward and kudos to the officials for getting the call right.

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