Two things happened Sunday night at Honda Center, and the hockey internet has spent a day pretending only one of them did. Dylan Cozens hit AJ Greer late, after the puck was gone, and got a five-minute major plus a game misconduct on review. That call was right. Greer then lay motionless on the ice for several seconds, popped up under his own power, and went looking to fight the man who hit him. That was ridiculous. Both are true, and you don't get to pick the one that flatters your favorite team.
Start with the part nobody is actually disputing. Cozens finished his check after Greer had already released the puck. Late is late. Intent doesn't have to enter into it, and whether the contact was dirty in spirit doesn't change the fact that you can't drive into a player who no longer has possession. By most accounts, the hit landed a few seconds after Greer let go of it. A major for interference in that situation is the rulebook working as written.
Where a chunk of the audience has gone off the rails is the rush to brand this a blindside headshot and wave around Rule 48. The footage doesn't back that up, and the officials didn't call it that. This went into the books as interference. People who watched it closely described the contact as shoulder-first, and nobody who broke it down frame by frame came away confident it was headhunting. If you want to hang Cozens with the league's illegal-check-to-the-head rule, you're prosecuting a case the refs on the ice declined to bring.
RatingThen there's Greer. Lying still long enough that people wondered if he was conscious, then springing up to chase down Cozens for a fight, is the kind of thing that empties a building's sympathy fast. He earned his unsportsmanlike minor for the chase. Anyone watching has to wonder how hurt a guy really is when he's healthy enough to go hunting moments after apparently being knocked out. That's his credibility problem.
Greer's ham acting doesn't legalize the hit. These are separate facts. The hit was late and drew the correct penalty. Greer oversold the aftermath and hurt himself doing it. One doesn't cancel the other. Judge the hit on its timing, which was bad. Judge the recovery on how silly it looked, which was very. Stop trying to use the second one to acquit the first.
None of this means Cozens is suspended. The Department of Player Safety hasn't ruled, and given the on-ice call was interference rather than a head shot, nobody should be penciling in a number of games. Greer's own history as a player who has drawn supplemental discipline before cuts into any attempt to cast him as a pure victim, but that's about his reputation, separate from what Cozens did on this specific play.
So award the blame where it actually sits. Cozens hit him after the puck was gone and deserved to have his night ended. Greer turned a legitimate grievance into a punchline. If your takeaway is that only one of those guys did something worth criticizing, you watched the replay with one eye closed.
