ICYMI: Antoine Roussel gets a 10 min misconduct for.... hugging?

The Canucks were bewildered by this one.

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Published 3 years ago
ICYMI: Antoine Roussel gets a 10 min misconduct for.... hugging?

I must say that overall I have felt that the officiating in the Stanley Cup playoffs from the National hockey League's crew of officials has been decent, but there have been a few occasions in these playoffs where I have felt the officials have been overbearing and have been too quick to blow the whistle for what are supposed to be considered playoff games.Perhaps the most extreme example of this however came on Sunday night during Game 1 between the Vancouver Canucks and the Las Vegas Golden Knights. 

Canucks forward Antoine Roussel and Golden Knights forward Ryan Reaves were going at one another for the entire night and in fact Golden Knights head coach Peter DeBoer made a point of putting Reaves out on the ice every time that Canucks head coach Travis Green saw fit to give Roussel some ice time, leading to some pretty amusing confrontations between the two. I'll be honest here both men seemed to be enjoying themselves and could both be seen smiling at one another during several points in the game. The most hilarious moment in my estimation came when Ryan Reaves began to literally cluck like a chicken towards the Canucks bench, the implication here being obvious and I suspect that the target of those clucks was the aforementioned Roussel.

You can't see it in this clip, but unlike in the other clips you can actually hear Reaves making the sound here:


The controversial call would come in the game's third period when Antoine Roussel was seemingly given a 10 minute game misconduct for what appeared to be a vicious hugging of Ryan Reaves. 

Now to be fair to the officials here the game had already gotten away from the Canucks at this point with the Golden Knights largely dominating and taking a 4 - 0 lead over Vancouver, so no doubt they were doing their best to prevent things from getting out of hand in a runaway game. Roussel was also jabbing Reaves with his stick prior to the hug, something that may have looked like a spear from certain angles or from a distance, so perhaps this was part of the reason for the misconduct as well. To be clear I don't believe Roussel speared Reaves here at all, I'm just saying it may have looked that way. 

Here's the replay:

Reaves and the Golden Knights made sure to taunt Roussel as he left the box, something tells me we will be seeing a lot more of this between these 2 in this series.


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