Landeskog's Goal Is Wiped Out for a Kicking Motion as Colorado Has Two Goals Disallowed

Colorado put the puck in the Dallas net four times on Wednesday night. Two of them counted. In the first ten minutes at Ball Arena the Avalanche had a goal erased on an offside challenge and a second, Gabriel Landeskog’s, overturned by the Situation Room for a distinct kicking motion, the first disallowal on that ground in the NHL this season, Scouting The Refs reports. Landeskog’s argument is the one every captain makes and few can make this cleanly: the puck hit him below the knee as he went to plant his skate, and the kick exists only if you watch it slowly enough.

What happened to Colorado’s two goals in the first period?

The first went on a challenge, the second on a league review. Jaden Schwartz beat Casey DeSmith at 1:55, but Dallas coach Glen Gulutzan challenged for offside and won: T.J. Hughes had preceded the puck into the zone, the goal came off the board and the clock was reset, Scouting The Refs reports. Less than eight minutes later Landeskog put a deflection past DeSmith and the goal was ruled good on the ice. The Situation Room initiated its own review and overturned it, ruling a distinct kicking motion under Rule 37.4. Dallas is now 3-for-3 on challenges this season, and offside challenges league-wide have succeeded on nine of ten attempts, Scouting The Refs reports. Colorado joined Montreal as the second team this season to lose two goals to reviews in one game, a club the Canadiens joined in stranger circumstances, with three goals disallowed before they won a shootout anyway.

What exactly is a distinct kicking motion?

It is the line Rule 37.4 draws between a deflection and a kick. A player who deliberately propels the puck with a kick of his foot or skate scores no goal. A puck that deflects in off a skate without a distinct kicking motion is legal, and a puck that deflects in off a player’s body, in any manner, is allowed, Scouting The Refs reports. That second clause is Landeskog’s case. The sequence, per The Hockey News, was a Schwartz one-timer that bounced off DeSmith’s pads and struck Landeskog just below his right knee. If the puck came off his knee, the body-deflection clause should have saved the goal regardless of what his skate did. The league read the skate’s forward movement as the propelling act, and the goal died on the distinction.

What did Landeskog say after the game?

That the replay is the problem. He said at real speed there is no chance he can react to that and kick the puck, and that in slow motion it looks like a kick motion, maybe, Scouting The Refs reports. His skate was already lifted, he explained, and he was going to plant it to skate. The Hockey News makes the same point from the rule’s own wording: distinct is supposed to mean unmistakable, and a motion that needs an extended review to identify sits awkwardly under that word. Landeskog accepted the decision was made. He also scored a legal goal in the second period, a net-front deflection, so his night contains both versions of the same act, one counted and one erased, separated by which body part the league decided did the work.

How close did Colorado come to a third erased goal?

One post’s width, twice. At 2:47 of the third period, with Dallas leading 2-1 on Arttu Hyry’s shorthanded goal, Gavin Brindley beat DeSmith and began celebrating with team-mates before realising the puck had hit both posts and stayed out, Scouting The Refs reports. The officials never signalled a goal and a quick review confirmed it never crossed the line. Brock Nelson tied the game at 8:21 of the third, and Hintz won the shootout in the fourth round, the Associated Press reports via TSN. A night that began with the review room deciding Colorado’s goals ended with the shootout deciding its point, the same ending that finished off the Flyers’ record winless start in Philadelphia and the opposite of the one Montreal got.

What happens next in the kicking-motion argument?

It waits for the next review, which on this season’s evidence will not take long. Colorado hosts Pittsburgh on Friday, and the standard now has a test case with a name on it: the season’s first distinct-kicking-motion disallowal, on a puck that struck the scorer below the knee, in a game decided by one shootout round. The desk has watched this file all month, from Dylan Peterson’s debut fight in Ottawa to the Nazar hearing, and the pattern is the same one Landeskog named. Slow motion manufactures intent that real speed does not contain, and until the league explains how a motion can be both distinct and invisible at full pace, every skate deflection in a crease is a coin the Situation Room gets to flip.