Connor McDavid is having a quiet season by his standards, which means he's got 65 points in 43 games—ho hum. He's still the scariest person on the ice with the puck on his stick, and if an opponent can take him out of a play at the cost of one of their own, there's not a player alive they wouldn't make that trade for. Unfortunately for McDavid, "superstar calls" in the NHL work the opposite way—less skilled defenders are more or less allowed to harass, pester, and otherwise torment the league's most talented skaters, right up to and slightly past the line of a foul, because officials simply won't call the rulebook to the letter if it'd mean whistling a penalty every seven seconds. It's enough to frustrate anyone into cross-checking Conor Garland in the face.
In the wild closing seconds of Vancouver's 3-2 win over Edmonton on Saturday, Garland took it upon himself to remove McDavid as a threat. Keep an eye on them during the last-minute barrage in the Canucks' end: Garland pulls McDavid to the ice and holds his arm so he can't get up. McDavid throws a punch, gets to his skates—and is promptly wrapped up and dragged down a second time. That was enough for him. After getting to his feet again, he delivered a cross-check to Garland's grill. Can't do that.
McDavid was ejected, and on Monday the Department of Player Safety announced he'll serve a three-game suspension. (Vancouver's Tyler Myers was also ejected and suspended three games for cross-checking Evan Bouchard, but I don't care about Tyler Myers.)
McDavid is a fairly physical player for his skill level. His defense, increasingly since his early seasons, is about laying hits to take players off the puck as much as it is about stickwork. He's been suspended once before in his career, for a shoulder to the head, and fined for a high elbow. He's not afraid to get messy. That willingness to tussle is, perhaps, responsible for him not drawing nearly as many penalties as a guy who has the puck as often as he does ought to. Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch says McDavid gets hacked and held more than anyone in the league:
“He puts up with way more. I don’t want to speak for other teams’ star players and what they put up with, but he’s under the microscope every time he’s on the ice because he’s dangerous. 'Don’t give him room, give him another shot, hold him a little bit, tug on his jersey, get in his way.' All those little things that could be called penalties.”
It's what Mario Lemieux complained about all the way back when he called the NHL a "garage league": The rules are always going to favor those willing to push them. But Garland clearly went above and beyond here. Right around the time he pulled McDavid to the ice a second time, no one would have blamed the refs—Wes McCauley and Chris Lee, for the record—for a whistle. It would have prevented this Connor-on-Conor violence, and it wouldn't have deprived us of a McDavid-Ovechkin showdown on Tuesday, or a full-rostered, beef-saturated Canucks–Oilers rematch Thursday. You can blame Garland for provoking, or McDavid for snapping, but that's just hockey, or something like it. Blame the zebras for letting it get that far.
