It looked awful, and nobody in Ottawa or anywhere else is pretending otherwise. Late in the third period on Tuesday night, Jakob Chychrun pinched down from the blue line and caught Nick Cousins with a shoulder check that put the 33-year-old veteran face-first on the ice. Cousins had collected the puck along the boards in his own zone, it tangled in his skates, and he never saw it coming. He went down, stayed down while teammates and training staff checked on him, and had to be helped off down the tunnel. Nobody disputes any of that.
Is Cousins okay? Nobody official has said. As of Wednesday morning there was no confirmed diagnosis, no team statement on what's wrong, just a report late Tuesday that he wasn't doing well. A player doesn't get helped off the ice and out of his own building if he's fine. Until the Senators or the league says otherwise, assume this is serious.
The officials reviewed the hit. They went to the monitor to decide whether it was a major penalty, and one account even had a major going up on the board before it got wiped away. When the review ended, the scoresheet showed nothing: no major, no minor, no penalty at all on a hit violent enough that the referees stopped the game to stare at a screen.
RatingI split from the crowd baying for Chychrun's head here. The angle of approach, the timing, the puck getting lost in Cousins's own feet: all of it reads as a hockey play. Chychrun is a former Senator who knows that building, and he hit a man who had the puck in open ice with his head down. You can hate the outcome and still call it a legal check. The problem is what "clean" gets allowed to mean.
A review exists to catch the worst of it. If the process ends with a guy carried off and zero penalty minutes on the board, the process just told you a player going limp and landing on his face clears every bar it has. That shouldn't be where the conversation stops. Centralized video review, handled off-ice the way the NFL does it instead of four officials making the call in real time, is at least an argument worth having. The system looked at this hit and shrugged.
Spare me the "he had it coming" angle, too. Cousins plays an edgy, physical game and spends his share of time in the box. Fine. None of that is a reason a man ends up face-first on the ice with nothing on the scoresheet.
Washington took the two points, winning it in overtime on a Cole Hutson goal. The Senators play Colorado on Thursday. Nobody in that room can say yet whether Cousins travels with them, and the officials who reviewed the hit that put him there ruled it worth exactly nothing.
