TORONTO — The optics don’t look good.
Brendan Gallagher will be getting his jaw wired shut after Matt Niskanen broke it with a cross-check in the dying minutes of Game 5 of Montreal’s series with Philadelphia, and we don’t know when he’ll be able to return. We do know it won’t be for Game 6 — or 7, if the Canadiens win on Friday — but Niskanen will be available to the Flyers come Sunday.
In a just world, that wouldn’t be the case. But justice appears to be a rather complex principle in the NHL.
Only in this league can a boarding minor — trumped up to a major and a game-misconduct because the victim of the hit suffered a small cut — equate to a crosscheck that causes someone a trip to the dentist, and one to the doctor for a procedure that ensures they’ll be drinking their food through a straw for the foreseeable future.
Granted, Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s punishment for the hit that sliced Travis Sanheim was 21 minutes and 45 seconds shorter than Niskanen’s will be. But we digress.
The NHL’s department of player safety put out a two-minute-and-24-second video to explain how they arrived at their conclusion following Niskanen’s 3 p.m. Eastern hearing on Thursday. There were 618 words spoken in there, but the only ones that resonated were the ones in the very first sentence.
“Wednesday night in Toronto, Flyers defenceman Matt Niskanen recklessly delivered a crosscheck to the face of Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher, knocking him to the ice and causing an injury.”
And yada, yada, yada, that amounts to a one-game suspension.
For a league that wants to curb concussions and eliminate head-shots, it’s a bad look.
And this ain’t pretty, either: The Canadiens were 4-7-1 sans Gallagher this season, and now, following a win with their backs against the wall in Game 5, they have to go runner, runner against a Flyers team that hasn’t lost consecutive games since early January, which was well before the world as we knew it stopped turning and COVID-19 paused the NHL season.
And then there’s the fact that the one thing the Canadiens proved, as they plummeted to 24th in the standings from October to March, was that they weren’t able to overcome injuries to Jonathan Drouin and Paul Byron, never mind one to the player who has led them in goals in each of the past three seasons. You know, the guy who interim head coach Kirk Muller referred to on Thursday as “our heartbeat.”
But here’s the thing: The Montreal team we’ve seen in this unprecedented summer tournament for the Stanley Cup bears little resemblance to the one that needed to be gifted the opportunity to play these games in Toronto. Against all odds, the Canadiens handled a championship-calibre Pittsburgh Penguins team in less than the maximum number of games it required to advance beyond the qualifying round, and they’ve been every bit as good as the top-seeded Flyers so far in this first-round series.
Their coach, Claude Julien, suffered a cardiac event, was hospitalized, operated on and sent home to Montreal after a hard-fought Game 1 loss to Philadelphia, and they responded to that adversity with a resounding 5-0 win in Game 2. They were shut out in Games 3 and 4 and did everything they could (and succeeded) to chase Carter Hart from his net in Game 5 — even if Flyers coach Alain Vigneault was going to pull the young goaltender but suddenly decided against it after a bad goal allowed was overturned due to a missed offside call.
Speaking of missed calls, there was Gallagher, pinned up along the boards, clutching at his mouth to keep his teeth from falling out, bleeding profusely before he got up from Niskanen’s “reckless cross-check” and berated the officials on his way off the ice.
It was wasted breath, and he knew it.
Just like these Canadiens know it would be a waste of energy to get bogged down in L’Affaire Niskanen. They can’t do anything about the fact that one of their best players will be unavailable to them for the rest of this series, nor can they change the fact that Philadelphia will have one of theirs back if it gets to Game 7.
Not that all recent history is irrelevant.
The Canadiens shouldn’t forget what they did to win Game 5. They overcame the early departure of their leading goal scorer in these playoffs (Kotkaniemi), and they battled back after blowing two leads. They should also remind themselves that they managed to get this far with just one goal in eight games from Gallagher, and, in his absence, they should play in his image — with reckless abandon and caution thrown to the wind.
We know there’s at least one person who believes they can do it. He’s the guy who wasn’t supposed to make it to the NHL — especially not just two-and-a-half years after being drafted 147th overall. The guy who no one thought would last in this league but is now eight years into his career. You know, the guy who’s made his living turning the optics upside down.
