At the end of the second period in Newark on Saturday, the on-ice crew's first instinct was a major penalty. Evan Rodrigues walked away with a four-minute double minor for high-sticking. That gap is worth asking about, because somebody blinked.
The sequence is simple. Nico Hischier buried his second of the night with 9.6 seconds left in the period to make it 4-1. On the ensuing faceoff, Marco Rossi gave Rodrigues a light shove off the dot after Rodrigues jumped early, and Rodrigues answered with a jabbing stick motion into Rossi's neck. The officials reached for a major penalty, then, after a review, relabeled it high-sticking and handed down a double minor.
That relabeling is the scandal itself.
Spearing and high-sticking aren't the same crime in the rulebook, and they don't carry the same punishment. High-sticking is a minor that only becomes a double minor if the stick draws blood or causes injury. Intent doesn't enter into it. Spearing works differently: an attempted spear with no contact gets a double minor, a spear that actually makes contact mandates a major and an automatic game misconduct, and a spear that injures someone is a match penalty. If what happened to Rossi's throat was genuinely a spear with contact, the officials didn't have the option to write "double minor" on the sheet. The only route to that number is deciding, on a second look, that a stick to the neck was a high stick.
Pick a lane. If the crew believed Rodrigues caught Rossi by accident, with no deliberate thrust, call a minor and move on. Nobody would blink. Instead they looked at it, decided it was bad enough to toss a player, and then changed their minds. You can't hold both of those thoughts at once. Reaching for the harshest call on the board and then softening it to the mildest version of a double minor shows the officials knew how ugly it looked and gave Rodrigues a pass anyway.
Spearing requires a visible, deliberate thrust, and maybe the crew judged the contact incidental. But incidental contact doesn't get an initial major and a game misconduct. The upgrade and the downgrade can't both be right. One of them is wrong, and the crew owns both.
The insult on top: Boeser was called for hooking at 2:01 of the third, which negated the back half of Rodrigues' double minor. He didn't even serve the whole thing. A jab at an opponent's throat cost New Jersey less than four minutes of real penalty time and never came close to costing them a player.
Rossi appeared to finish the game, based on his box-score activity. As of Oct. 10, 2026, there's been no word of any league follow-up. The Department of Player Safety can still make the on-ice crew look better if it wants. But the first and best chance to get this right was on the ice, and the crew at Prudential Center flinched.
