Opinion | Nazem Kadri goal is another Cup final controversy, and it could lead to another title under review

When Nazem Kadri scored the winning goal in overtime of Wednesday’s Game 4 of the Stanley Cup final, it was like something out of a storybook.

So it tells you a lot about the National Hockey League that in the immediate wake of that magical moment, talk turned to the rule book. Never mind the improbable narrative arc being traced by Kadri, once traded from Toronto because he couldn’t be trusted in the playoffs, coming through in the clutch for the Colorado Avalanche. Never mind that Kadri shot that fateful puck through the pain of a broken thumb that required surgery less than three weeks ago, or that he beat the goaltender who is widely regarded as the best puckstopper on the planet, Tampa Bay’s Andrei Vasilevskiy, to give the Avalanche a 3-1 stranglehold on the series.

No league turns what should be an unfettered celebration into a moment of hand-wringing consternation quite like the NHL. But such was the situation after replays of Kadri’s winning play showed an obvious Colorado infraction that had been overlooked by the four on-ice officials. The Avalanche had six skaters on the ice when Kadri scored — too many men, by any measure. And even if too many men is “a judgment call,” as the league reminded everyone in a post-game statement — complete with a five-foot buffer zone around the bench to account for the chaos of changing on the fly — this wasn’t exactly the stuff of a bang-bang blur. The player Kadri jumped on the ice to replace, Nathan MacKinnon, was 40-plus feet from the Colorado bench when Kadri set off on the rush that led to his winning goal.

So you’ll understand why Jon Cooper, the Tampa Bay head coach, cut short his post-game remarks after a not-so-subtle rebuke of the missed call.

“This one is going to sting much more than others … My heart breaks for the players,” Cooper said. “Because we probably still should be playing.”

You could certainly frame Cooper’s post-game soliloquy as disingenuous, a former lawyer pre-emptively lobbying for calls in Friday’s Game 5 while revving up his team with talk of an us-against-the-world injustice. Or perhaps Cooper was deflecting from the fact his wobbling squad was badly outplayed as the night went on, outshot 10-3 in overtime.

Even if the goal came with the Avalanche in clear violation of a rule, the violation of the rule didn’t necessarily cause the goal. Kadri still had to beat two defencemen and Vasilevskiy while playing with one good hand.

And even if the Lightning have a case, this isn’t a league that’s sympathetic to even the most egregious of season-defining officiating errors. As commissioner Gary Bettman shamelessly explained to The Buffalo News in looking back on the Brett Hull foot-in-crease goal — forever known in Western New York as “no goal” — that gave the Dallas Stars the deciding Game 6 win over the Sabres in the 1999 Stanley Cup final: “That was a goal … I understand people in Buffalo feel badly about it and have differing recollections in terms of what was right and wrong. But isn’t that part of the magic and aura and lure of sports, when things out of the ordinary take place?”

Ah, yes: The magic and aura and lure of getting jobbed by both the on-ice refs and the video-replay judge.

All these years later, there’s been a maddening inconsistency to the officiating standard of these Stanley Cup playoffs. Wednesday’s Game 4 was lightly refereed, to put it kindly. Colorado’s too-many-men call was far from the only penalty that was overlooked. Each team was granted a mere two power plays apiece. Which is only confusing when you consider that when these playoffs began, the polar opposite was true. The opening four games of Tampa Bay’s first-round series with the Maple Leafs saw the teams average about five power-play opportunities apiece. In other words, in the span of the very same post-season, the pendulum has swung from “a penalty’s a penalty” to “let them play.” Good luck making sense of that.

If uncontrollable chaos is part of hockey’s charm, this was hardly the first time “too many men” has become the focus of an important playoff series. The April death of Montreal Canadiens great Guy Lafleur called to mind the turning point of Game 7 of the 1979 Stanley Cup semifinal between the Canadiens and the Boston Bruins. In that instance, the Bruins held a late-game lead when a botched line change led to the most famous too-many-men penalty in the history of the sport, one that led to Lafleur’s game-tying power-play slapshot and a Montreal overtime win.

If that instance of too many men extended one dynasty — the Canadiens, who’d won three straight Stanley Cups, would go on to win a fourth against the Rangers — the missed call in Colorado put a dent in another. The Lightning, of course, are attempting to become the first team to win three straight championships in 40 years. Even down 3-1, it’s difficult to count them out.

Still, as Cooper was telling reporters Thursday: “This is a game of breaks.” And maybe Wednesday’s game-winner was a case of the breaks evening out. It’s worth remembering that the Lightning scored a key goal in the Cup semifinal against the New York Islanders under similar circumstances around this time last year. After the referees missed that call, Islanders coach Barry Trotz checked the video evidence on a nearby iPad and hollered to the officials about Tampa Bay’s “seven f——’ guys on the ice.”

“Nothing we can do to turn back. They missed it. It’s unfortunate. But it’s water under the bridge now,” Cooper said on Thursday. “The reason there’s a rule is if you gain a significant advantage. And that’s probably what happened there. But that happens all the time in line changes. It’s an inexact science.”

Too many men isn’t eligible to be enforced or overturned by a coach’s video challenge, and maybe that’s for the best. In a league in which large swaths of the rule book are less black and white than grey, all the high-definition replays in the world won’t change the fact that judgment calls are ultimately in the eye of the beholder. Expanding video replay may or may not lead to justice being better served. It’ll definitely result in justice being agonizingly delayed. For a league that’s well acquainted with turning the thrill of victory into the acrimony of controversy, maybe it’s best not to open up further possibilities of botching a Cup-deciding call more than once.

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