We’re only one game into the Sens-Rangers series, and we already have a little bit of controversy.
Ottawa won Game 1, 2-1, thanks to Erik Karlsson’s game-winning goal from a seemingly impossible angle (seriously, he scored from the corner).
But should it have counted?
There’s no issue with the Karlsson shot going off Henrik Lundqvist’s mask and in, but the Rangers felt that the referees missed an icing call moments before the goal happened.
Karlsson is standing near his own blue line when he sends a pass in Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s direction. Did Pageau get a piece of it? It’s hard to tell from the angles we have at our disposal, but Alain Vigneault seemed to have had a good look at the play.
“We felt on their game-winning goal it should have been icing,” Vigneault said, per Sportsnet. “When we look at it, and look at the angles we get, I think it should have been icing. But at the end of the game you gotta play and you gotta do more than we did tonight to win.”
Challenging icing calls isn’t permitted, so when the officials decided that Pageau touched the puck, there’s nothing more the Rangers could do to reverse the call (except get the puck out of the zone when they had the chance).