These playoff have had everything, from unlikely comebacks to huge upsets to bloody feuds to preternatural feats of athleticism. You can keep all that. We true connoisseurs of professional sports controversies have been craving a rulebook kerfuffle, and in Sunday’s Stars home win over the Jets, we finally got one. This is why they play the game; it’s time for some lawyerpuck.
The third-period, tie-breaking goal in an eventual 5-2 Dallas win was credited to Alex Petrovic, but that doesn’t come close to telling the story. Petrovic, skating past the side of the net, tried to gather a rebound and directed it with his left skate into the crease. It appeared that untouched it would have slid harmlessly through the crease, but Connor Hellebuyck, trying to clear the puck, angled it into his own net. Goal? After eight minutes of video review, and no doubt the frantic flipping of rulebook pages in the NHL’s Situation Room: Goal.
The average NHL fan is intimately familiar with the basics of Rule 49, which covers kicked pucks. Any good fan has had nightmares about being on wrong side of a judgment call over what defines a “distinct kicking motion.” But Rule 49 is so much more involved than that, and the issue here was not whether Petrovic kicked the puck—it was pretty apparent that he did, and confirmed by the league later—but rather what to do when a kicked puck then bounces off the goalie’s stick and into the net.
49.2 has some clarifications. In this instance, they clarify nothing.
We’ve found it! A lacuna in the holy scripture, into which we can all project our own biases and moralities! An edge case that has apparently not come up in a century of NHL hockey, or at least has happened so rarely that no one ever bothered writing it down.
Because none of these examples cover this exact situation: after being kicked by Petrovic, who was (iv) not coming to a stop, the puck did not (i) bounce off anyone’s body, or (iii) off his own stick. It also did not (ii) deflect off the stick of any other skater, but rather Hellebuyck’s, the one player specifically excluded from this sub-rule applying to. Why specifically mention and exclude that possibility if you’re not going to tell us what to do in that case? Because the rulebook has been composed piecemeal over time by fallible humans, and it’s simply not feasible to cover every possibility is one answer. Another is that sometimes it’s funny to make everyone confused and mad.
Here’s the NHL’s official statement on the matter, which cleared nothing up.
“The Situation Room initiated a video review to further examine if Alexander Petrovic kicked the puck into the Winnipeg net. Video was then used to determine if the puck made contact with Petrovic’s stick prior to it entering the net. After looking at all available replays, video review supported the Referee’s call on the ice that Connor Hellebuyck propelled the puck into his own net.”
The league seems to be using “propelled” here to distinguish what Hellebuyck did from merely “deflecting” the puck—closer to a right angle than an obtuse one. (Supporting this interpretation, Stars coach Pete DeBoer said officials told him the goal was good because Hellebuyck was attempting to play the puck.) If that’s the case, however, they could have worded this a lot clearer by simply mentioning what rule actually applies. Unsurprisingly, Jets coach Scott Arniel took issue with the league’s explanation, which echoed what he was told by officials on the ice.
“So they said that Helly propelled the puck in, and I haven’t seen the word ‘propelled’ in the rulebook,” Arniel said. In point of fact the word is in there—just not in any situation that applies here.
The rulebook’s silence on this precise scenario would appear to be Hellebuyck’s and Winnipeg’s undoing. In the absence of guidance to the contrary, the puck after coming off Petrovic’s skate was just like any other puck in the crease—etiologically unmoored, without an Aristotelian prime mover—a puck free from the shackles of its own history or creation. A puck that Connor Hellebuyck put in his own net. Dallas goal.
OK, great, we’ve settled this. Now, to wonder if there’s a conspiracy of non-Canadian players scoring own-goals to keep Canadian teams from finally winning a Cup. Do your own research.