During the winning goal in Sunday’s Game 1, Devils goalie Martin Brodeur had his stick moved by Flyers winger James van Riemsdyk’s skate, hindering his ability to make the save. (Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

After watching these unpredictable and bizarre Stanley Cup playoffs unfold through the weekend, one thing is certain: the numerous incidents involving the question of goaltender interference demands that the NHL rethink adding it to the league’s list of goal/no-goal calls that are reviewable via video.

UPDATE: On TSN Monday night, Darren Dreger reported the NHL GMs will discuss adding goaltender interference to the video review situations at their next meeting and predicted it would pass (video).

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The Coyotes will have to be resourceful and determined to beat Nashville’s stout defense that has been fortified at key moments by the monster goaltending of Pekka Rinne. (Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

We quickly move to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, what they call the conference semi-finals. Upsets galore, tight games, lots of overtime and fierce play marked the first round and that shouldn’t change too much now. With some strong teams knocked out, every survivor must figure that it has a chance to keep its playoff run alive. All it has to do is continue playing to its strengths, shore up its weaknesses and have a good game plan against its opponent. Easy, right?

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The Rangers have held Ottawa’s dangerous blueliner Erik Karlsson in check. (Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

A Game 7 at Madison Square Garden can make for an uproarious evening. The last ones there happened in 1994: the Eastern Conference Championship victory by the Rangers over the Devils in the second overtime period (“Matteau! Matteau! Matteau!”), followed by the nail-biting conclusion to the Stanley Cup Final against the Canucks. But if tonight’s Game 7 turns out for the Rangers the way it turned out for the Bruins on their home ice on Wednesday – if the underdog Senators win just as the underdog Capitals won — the uproar will be directed inward.

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Playing with great poise, young Braden Holtby has a chance to write another chapter in goaltending lore. (Brian Babineau/NHLI via Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

This memorable first round moves on Wednesday night to the first of three Game 7s in the Eastern Conference when a pair of marquee clubs square off in Boston: the Stanley Cup champion Bruins and the newly-minted defensive strong boys/former offensive dynamo Washington Capitals.

Had it not been for the five straight overtime games between the Coyotes and Blackhawks, this would be hailed as clearly the opening round’s tightest series. Three matches have gone to extra time and of the total 387 minutes 31 seconds played in the six games, the teams have been tied for 268: 54 of them. Washington has led for 74:14; Boston for 44:23. The only two-goal lead, which the Caps had in Game 5, lasted all of 2:54. In a postseason that has seen many see-saw lead changes, this series has had none.

Additionally, each team has scored 14 goals. But most notably, this is the first playoff matchup in Stanley Cup history ever to have its first six games all decided by one-goal margins.

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Defenseman Brian Campbell has Stanley Cup experience on a team hoping to end Florida’s playoff series drought. The Devils say that sniper Ilya Kovalchuk (right) is healthy. (Andy Marlin/NHLI via Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

It’s the series that few people are watching and that’s really a shame because it’s been just as compelling as the rest of the first round, but without any of the histrionics that have accompanied most of the other matchups. So if you haven’t seen any of the Panthers-Devils clash, Tuesday is your big chance — there’s no other game on the playoff schedule to compete with their Game 6 encounter.

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Coyotes winger Mikkel Boedker is one of the poster boys for this postseason’s exceptional spate of close games: he’s scored two OT goals, one shy of the single year record. (Bill Smith/NHLI via Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

It’s been a remarkable first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, historic in many ways. Some of that history is worth celebrating and some is not, but the fact that we’re not even through it yet could make this year’s tournament one we’ll all remember for a long time.

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Long a lightning rod for the Sharks’ ongoing postseason disappointment, Patrick Marleau may have cost his team its series against the Blues by taking a boneheaded penalty at a particularly important time. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

We’ve heard, read and written a lot this week about discipline — or lack of it — in the Stanley Cup playoffs, almost all of it due to the unprecedented manner in which the opening round has unfolded. There has been an elevated number of suspensions for illegal dangerous play and fights. “This was the time of year when you saw the best players playing the best hockey,” Pat Hickey of The Montreal Gazette wrote earlier this week, reflecting on the unusual course most series took in the early going as compared to the norm. “The emphasis was on skill. There was defence and hard hitting but clean hits were the order of the day because nobody wanted to leave his team vulnerable by taking a dumb penalty.”

Dumb penalties come in many varieties. Besides the sucker punches and hair pulling, we’ve also seen selfishly brandished sticks to faces, elbows to skulls, helmets grabbed and a head smashed into the glass, and leaping late head shots. So it was almost refreshing on Thursday night to see a plain old stupid interference penalty at a critical moment that cost a team the game. Almost refreshing…but not really.

Patrick Marleau, come on down.

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Refs seem to have rediscovered the idea that sending a player to the box and leaving his team in a potentially costly penalty-kill is one of the best ways to curb on-ice mayhem. (Mark Goldman/Icon SMI)

By Stu Hackel

Perhaps Wednesday will go down as the day the NHL regained some control over the Stanley Cup playoffs and did it in the most logical manner – having the referees call penalties rather than “let the boys play.”

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Blackhawks star Marian Hossa was hospitalized by a dangerous illegal headshot of the kind the NHL has been trying to eliminate, not a fight or a clean, hard check. (Photo by Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

What threatens to become the NHL’s Spring of Shame continued on Day 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs when Marian Hossa was stretchered off in the first period of the Coyotes-Blackhawks game on Tuesday night, the result of a clearly illegal but unpenalized hit by multiple offender Raffi Torres. It was the lasting image on another compelling night of playoff hockey and it overshadowed all else, just as each daily episode of brutal play has done.

This has to be viewed as a crisis for the NHL. The league was prepared to make this its greatest playoffs ever, especially in the U.S., with NBC and its family of channels pumping every game of every series into homes for the first time. But what will likely be remembered by its growing audience is not the best hockey of the year, but perhaps the most barbaric. Who knows what that will mean in the long run? More on that later.

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Dustin Brown and Brian Boyle have emerged as the two big surprise stars of the postseason thus far. (Getty Images)

By Stu Hackel

One major aspect of the playoffs careening out of control, the subject of our post yesterday, is that players misdirect their heightened emotions. There is much on the line, of course, and every hockey fan admires the fact that NHLers can invest so much more of themselves in the game and play with a committment that is unparalleled in all of sports. The problem comes when they cannot channel their emotions correctly, and that has been the defining characteristic of the first week of the tournament.

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