Well, that kicked up a notch, didn’t it?
After Brooks Orpik’s pretty gross hit on Olli Maatta in Game 2 you figured that there would be some kind of retribution. You would have gotten pretty short odds on it being known-hothead and lunatic Kris Letang taking a late run at Marcus Johansson, because that made sense. Once again the refs made things worse when they thought they were making things better by keeping Letang in the game. When you don’t eject someone for a hit that late and that malicious, you’re basically asking the other team to take runs at him all night which is just going to escalate the silliness into something no one wants. And that’s what they got. Maybe one day the NHL will hire refs with balls, but I’m fairly sure I’ll be nothing but dust in the wind by the time they do.