Boston-Tampa Game 2; Strange Goal?

What do you do against a team that has just won 8 games in a row?

What do you do against a 41 year old goalie who, in 12 playoff games this season, has never given up more than 3 goals in a game and has the lowest GAA and best SV%?

What do you do in a situation where if you lose game 2 on home ice, you are going to be forced to steal a game or 2 on the road to climb back into the series?

Well Boston answered all of these questions.

You score 6 goals. That’s what you do.

The Boston Bruins put up an impressive 6 goals against the Tampa Bay Lightning tonight in game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals. This was an important answer to their game 1 5-2 loss on home ice. People doubted their chances again in game 2 because forward Patrice Bergeron is still out with a concussion. But tonight 19 year old Tyler Seguin was magical and scored a couple of goals to help his team win.

Now I can go on discussing the excitement of this game tonight. On how the Bruins were able to chase Dwayne Roloson who, up until now, looked almost unbeatable. But I just want to briefly discuss one goal in the game and what happened.

With his team down 6-4 with just 6:45 left to go in the game, Tampa’s Viktor Hedman took a shot from the point that hit both posts and rolled through the crease. After much scurrying, the puck was finally stuffed into the vacant net by Dominic Moore. At first I thought there should have been a whistle because I saw Boston goalie Tim Thomas’ helmet lying on the ice. And any hockey fan knows that when a goalie loses their helmet, there is an automatic whistle and the play is dead. People on twitter were raving about how there was a missed call and that it should have been waived off immediately.

“How does a goal not get automatically disallowed if the goalie's mask is off? That's dangerous,” said hockey fan/comedian @whatnojagr.

“How on earth does the whistle not blow there? 4 stripes on the ice and no one sees Thomas without his bucket...” said NJ Devils backup goalie Mike McKenna. (@MikeMcKenna56)

Washington Capitals defenseman John Carlson said “Do they not blow the whistle when the goalies mask falls off?” (@JohnCarlson74)

And Yahoo! Puck Daddy cowriter Rob Pizzo said “I thought the whistle was supposed to be blown as soon as a goalie's helmet is knocked off” (@robpizzo)

On the replay it showed that the puck ended off caroming off of Thomas’ face before crossing the goal line. So at the time my thought process was this:

‘So they make a bad call by not recognizing that his mask came off. And the whole point of the rule in the first place was so the goalie wouldn’t get hit in the face with the puck. Which was exactly what happened. So the referees missed a standard call which was made specifically to avoid a situation like this.’

Thankfully there is an NHL rulebook online and after a few minutes of scrolling through it I found the answer.

Rule 9.5: Protective Equipment

When a goalkeeper has lost his helmet and/or face mask and his team has possession of the puck, the play shall be stopped immediately to allow the goalkeeper the opportunity to regain his helmet and/or face mask. When the opposing team has possession of the puck, play shall only be stopped if there is no immediate and impending scoring opportunity. This stoppage of play must be made by the Referee. When play is stopped because the goalkeeper has lost his helmet and/or face mask, the ensuing face-off shall take place at one of the defending team’s end zone face-off spots.

So there you have it ladies and gentleman. Since Tampa had possession of the puck, and since there was an immediate scoring opportunity (they had the puck on the goal line with the net wide open) there was no whistle. SO this was a fantastic job by the referees to not make the call when all common sense (the fact that there’s a goalie lying in the direction of a puck coming at him and the fact that if he doesn’t blow the whistle, all of TD Garden will boo him) pointed otherwise.

One last note.

My good youtube friend bestdanghockeygoals put this video up due to my request. I promised him to post to my followers to like his page on facebook so if you can just press the like button on this page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/­Bestdanghockeygoals-Offical-Fa­n-Page/186090148109150 or you can just search “Bestdanghockeygoals official fan page” on facebook and do it that way. This guys nice so please help him out.