The replay clears Tom Wilson, and that's going to annoy a lot of people who had their verdict typed out before the puck dropped. Wilson is the most hated man in the sport, he's earned every bit of that reputation, and this time he didn't do the thing everyone instantly accused him of.
This is what happened in the second period Wednesday night in Washington. Ivan Miroshnichenko caught Juraj Slafkovsky in the neutral zone with a shoulder-to-chest hit that knocked the 22-year-old clean off his feet. That hit was legal and clean. The problem is what came next: Slafkovsky went down and slid out of control along the ice, Wilson was coming the other way with no time to get out of the path, and Slafkovsky's head met Wilson's lower body. Slafkovsky got up and went straight down the tunnel while his teammates grabbed anyone in a Capitals sweater.
What Wilson did was barely avoidable, if that. The case against him is that Wilson chose a skating lane that ended with his leg at head height, and that a player with his history doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt. The reputation is real. But you can't line up a target that's already down and sliding. There was nothing to anticipate and nothing to pick. The first-overall pick from 2022 was a passenger the moment Miroshnichenko put him down, and Wilson happened to be the wall he slid into.
The part that should make a Canadiens fan furious is the penalty sheet, and Wilson had nothing to do with it. At 15:42 of the second, the officials handed out roughing minors to Miroshnichenko, Alexandre Carrier and Kaiden Guhle. Two of those three play for Montreal. A major was called on the play and then wiped on review. So the sequence reads like this: Montreal's best young forward gets flattened by a legal hit, slides into a bad spot, leaves the game, his teammates respond the way every room in the league says they're supposed to, and Montreal skates away a man down. Wilson, who was in the middle of the ugliest moment of the night, wasn't penalized at all.
That's the call worth yelling about. The refs didn't need to invent a penalty for Wilson. The problem is that when you hand out roughing minors after a scrum, the math ends up punishing the team that got hurt. If you're going to let both hits stand as clean, which they were, then the scrum is just a scrum, and evening it up shouldn't leave one bench shorter than the other.
The league hasn't announced any discipline, and it shouldn't have to, because there's no hit here to suspend. The villain the feed wanted doesn't exist in this clip. The officiating that turned Montreal's bad luck into a penalty kill is a different story, and that's the one that deserves the heat.
