A goalie who stays in his blue paint is one of the most protected players in hockey. Leave the crease to go hunt a forward, and that protection should disappear. Joel Hofer left it. He stepped out of his way to put Kirill Kaprizov into the boards behind the St. Louis net on Thursday night in St. Paul, and the two minutes he drew for interference barely covers what that play was.
The box score lists it plainly: Hofer, two minutes for interference, served by Jimmy Snuggerud. The on-ice officials saw a goaltender outside his area taking a run at a skater chasing a loose puck, and they called it. Quinn Hughes said they got it right. A called penalty on a goalie who went out of his way to hit the other team's best player is a big deal.
Jesper Wallstedt didn't dress it up. "I think it's a dirty play," the Wild backup said. "There's no reason for him to go out there and not play the puck and just play the player. He knows, everyone knows, that's one of our best players." Then: "If they give me a penalty when players are skating through my crease, they should give him penalties for being outside the crease, hitting guys." A forward who grazes a goalie in the crease gets whistled, reviewed and lectured about respecting the netminder. A goalie who travels to the boards to run a forward gets a routine minor and a shrug.
Wallstedt separated the man from the act. "I like him as a guy," he said. "I thought that was an ugly play from him." A good guy, by his account, who pulled an ugly play.
If Hofer had clean possession of that puck, a shoulder-to-shoulder bump in that spot is just a goalie playing the puck, and nobody blinks. But he didn't play the puck. The accounts all say he left his path to find the body. Once a goalie chooses the man over the puck out near the boards, he's a skater, and he gets judged like one. A skater who does that to Kaprizov in open ice is having a conversation with the Department of Player Safety. The position of the player doing it shouldn't change the standard.
The stakes are what turned the Minnesota room cold. Kaprizov was the best player on the ice before he left it: a goal and two assists in just under 23 minutes, extending a start that has him among the league's top scorers through eight games. Minnesota walked in already missing Jared Spurgeon and Brock Faber, among others. A short-handed team watching a goalie leave his net to put its one irreplaceable forward into the wall reacts with an edge. They did.
The scare itself could have been worse than it looked. Kaprizov folded on impact and stayed down for a bit before getting up. He took his next shift on the power play, missed a loose puck in the slot that Robert Thomas buried shorthanded, and only then headed down the tunnel. John Hynes said afterward that Kaprizov is OK. His teammates said the same. The injury is undisclosed, and his status for Sunday against Columbus wasn't known. He got lucky. That doesn't make the hit okay.
Nobody from St. Louis has gone on record calling this clean. No Hofer defense, no coach standing at a podium explaining the hit. Silence isn't proof, but a team usually has plenty to say when it thinks a call against its goalie was wrong. St. Louis had nothing.
Whether the league does anything is a separate matter. Goalies rarely get the full Player Safety treatment a skater would for the same geography, which is exactly what Wallstedt was pointing at. Hofer went looking for Kaprizov, and a two-minute minor is the cheapest possible price for it.
