Zach Benson threw an elbow at Cole Caufield's head at centre ice on Saturday night, and the whole argument trying to justify it rests on a player who wasn't even involved. The defense goes like this: Benson got slashed and grabbed, so the elbow was a reflex. The guy holding him was Lane Hutson. Caufield had nothing to do with it. Benson turned and caught the wrong man flush in the face.
Rewind to the shift before the penalty: Hutson had a hand on Benson to hold body position. The referee called it holding, but it was a legal, everyday positioning battle, not a dirty play. Then Benson spun and elbowed Caufield. No account of the sequence has Caufield slashing Benson, grabbing him, or touching him at all before the elbow landed. The retaliation theory collapses because nothing ever happened to retaliate against. You can't swing at a man in self-defense when he hasn't laid a finger on you.
Even if Caufield had cross-checked him in the chops first, an elbow to the head is indefensible. You don't answer a slash by targeting someone's brain. Hockey polices retaliation precisely because "he started it" is the excuse every dangerous hit hides behind. There's a legal response to being held. A forearm to the skull isn't it.
Buffalo paid for it fast. Benson went off for elbowing Caufield at 15:35 of the second period, with Dennis Gilbert already in the box, so Montreal got a two-man advantage. The Canadiens got one look on the 5-on-3, a shot from Nick Suzuki in those forty-five seconds. It was Benson's only penalty of the night, one minor for elbowing. The box score is clean except for that line, and he put it there himself.
Caufield is the reigning Lady Byng winner, the trophy for playing the game clean. Benson chose an elbow to a man who hadn't touched him. That's the cheap version of toughness: it lets you hurt someone without risking a fair fight.
This looked like a frustrated, instinctive shove with the elbow up, the kind of thing that happens when a player's temper flares in a scrum. It may well have been reflex, and reflex explains why it happened. It just shouldn't be any NHL player's reflex to drive an elbow into someone's head.
Whether the Department of Player Safety does anything with it is still unclear. They should look hard at it. Benson got a two-minute minor for a play with no provocation and real danger, and if the league decides that's the whole price, it's telling every agitator in the league that the elbow is free.
