Okay so that OT penalty...
Does anyone have a slow-mo replay of it? My initial thought was that it was soft, but every time I look at it in realtime it's hard not to see it as a call that could go either way. Like Mikko said, it would be dumb for him to intentionally drop his stick in the defensive zone in OT and give Vegas a scoring opportunity.
I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth, because I'm happy to be going to Vegas up 2-0, but I also can't help but feel like DeBoer's f***ing whining/crying in the postgame is going to result in some swallowed whistles in G3. We already saw some of that this last game with the Lando cross check to the face and the Burakovsky trip not long after. I'm not calling the Mikko breakaway a trip, I think that was a defensive battle and Rantanen just ended up losing an edge.
The issue is the refs and the NHL started to set a standard for that call where 95% of the time when someone slashes a stick out of another player's hands, it's called a penalty.
We knew that was the standard in the regular season, but I'm not sure we knew if they would continue that standard in the playoffs. It looks like they might.
Personally, I hate that penalty. Especially when a player like Mikko is only holding his stick with one hand. I don't think he dropped it intentionally because like he said that would be stupid in the D zone, but it's still easy to lose his stick there.
That said, I think Bednar made a good point that they would have been in a lot of trouble in that situation if there wasn't a penalty based on where Mikko was on ice and that Vegas had the puck and would have been able to generate a dangerous scoring chance in OT.
It was also a pretty hard slash when you watch it in real time, so even though I don't like that penalty, Smith didn't have to do it that hard. It was a self inflected penalty like hooking the hands. Don't do it and it won't get called.
Either way DeBitch is a bitch for constantly complaining about the officiating, when his team has been getting away with a ton, and the bottom line is they've lost two games. Instead of getting his team focused on how to win game 3, he's helping them focus on excuses for why they lost game 2. Fine by me.