DK's Daily Shot of Penguins: Bite back, already!

0:00Now be as clear as I can on this subject. It's one of those that no matter how I spell it out, I don't spell it out well enough. When the officiating is bad, it's almost always bad both ways. When the officiating is bad in that same spirit, it doesn't mean that's why your team lost. Good morning to you, good Friday morning. I'm Dan Kovacovitch of DK Pittsburgh Sports. This is Daily Shot of Penguins. It comes your way bright and early every weekday. If you're into football and or baseball, both of which are run way better than this game. Certainly at the level of competition, I also offered daily shots of Steelers and Pirates in the same place that you found this. Sabers 5, Penguins 1, last night at PPG Pain Serena, I was looking forward to this one.

1:03When I say that, I don't just mean beforehand. I covered that game in Buffalo a month ago. The Sabers took that one really hard. The Penguins were really proud of it and both responses were appropriate. They came out for the first period of this one, flying. There was a really, really good pace. Each team comes up with a shorty on a fast break and it's one one at the first intermission and yeah, you have your hopes up here. This is some good hockey we're watching here and it's at that point that two people nobody paid to watch. Firm and South and Brandon Blandina, the referees, decided that maybe they should leave their mark on this too. So second period starts and first shift, you've got any Malcolm line is out there looking

2:04a little bit dangerous in the Buffalo zone, past comes to the middle for Gino and he gets slashed on the hand by Rasmus Dottlin and Gino shakes the hand and then kind of skates around Dottlin and heads toward the Buffalo net anyway Dottlin follows him, high sticks him and then once he really gets braced, cross checks Gino across the right side and into the Buffalo cage. Not one of these gets called, South is the referee in this instance. He is right there. You can see his eyeballs fixed on these two the entire time on multiple replays. His right arm doesn't budge. Now, what Gino does next isn't defensible based on what I said, it was dumb, it's going to end up costing him a suspension, it's going to end up costing the penguins. Another of their two legendary centers, at a time where this is not a great thing to

3:10be happening. But Gino comes down with his stick across the side of Dottlin's head and neck and it's a bad looking thing because it's a bad play and it's a bad decision. Repeating myself here for emphasis, that's squarely on Gino. That part of the referees job is to ensure that situations don't escalate, that they don't reach the point where they bubble over into retaliation. Gino lived with the slash, skated around Dottlin, got high sticked once, tried to reset himself, got cross checked in the shoulder and lost his brain. Once more for a hat trick on my part, I am not taking away the blame from Gino here. I am saying that the entire sequence was poorly officiated, up until all concerned made the correct call of a major penalty on Gino that maybe shouldn't have happened or wouldn't

4:16have happened if they'd done their damn jobs in the first place. You see the line that I'm drawing there good because that's it for my lines. The rest of these are just bad. Gold tender interference. Well, the lack of a gold tender interference call on Josh Don, on the Sabre second goal, the one that ended up being the winner was just abysmal. It even by the standards that are being dug so deep into the figurative earth that they're about to hit China. This league has no clue what gold tender interference is anymore. They have no clue what their own guidelines are. They've lost their way on this completely, not just in Pittsburgh everywhere. It feels like a Pittsburgh issue because Dan Muse is now 0 for 7 on gold tender interference challenges. That's an unbelievable number.

5:17If he was a complete idiot, you wouldn't believe that he'd be 0 for 7. But in this case, Don's in Arter Shilov's crease. Even though Chris Latang is behind him and his left hand touches Don's back and there's an appearance of a little bit of a shove, not much. Don is the one who lowers his chest into Shilov's mask, makes contact while his skate is in the blue paint just for kicks. Shilov's unwittingly makes a save on a first shot, meaning he didn't even see it, it just hit his right pad. And the puck comes out and Josh Norris buries it into a vacated net. Easiest challenge ever. Nope, good goal. I ask Ryan Shay afterward just to play around a little bit. What is gold tender interference? Honestly, I can't tell you what it is now, I mean, we saw one against us in the Ranger

6:19game. I saw one later that night. I forgot what game, but it's, I guess, it looks like for every other team, it's kind of, the guy barely gets grazed and it's an old goal, but I guess for us, it's not working our favor. Yeah, I mean. Did you see the JT Miller one? I did not. It was close to run. I did not. It was close to run. Right after we left the guard. Yeah. You wouldn't believe it. Yeah. So, I mean, I mean, but so, yeah, I don't think we had our A game from the start and when you have to kill that many penalties, you're not going to really get a lot of offence of touches and we're just giving their best players more touches. So, it's all those penalties they're going to do for them at the end of the day. And yeah, I thought our PK was great, we competed hard. I mean, it's been great and the compete will always be there. I mean, it's the NHL, you give teams six or seven opportunities, they're probably going to make it better. It's funny. You hear the back and forth there between the two of us, but she loves is actually getting

7:19dressed at the next stall, kind of listening in and nodding the entire time. He would end up saying much the same once surrounded by all the cameras and microphones. And if these two weren't bad enough, later in the second period, Beck Malinstein just piled drives Parker Wather Spoon from behind into the board's Wather Spoon's face goes in sideways into the red board that's at the top of the white board. You know what I'm talking about? The part that juts out, you know, just to make it a little bit worse. And to his credit, this is one tough dude. He just bounces up and keeps playing. This one's on Blondina. He's watching from center red. And again, all of this is documented on film. It's not me speculating on anything. You can see everything. The referees, reactions, or lack thereof in Blondina raises his right arm appropriately as soon as it happens.

8:20They call it a minor. If you look in the NHL rule book, which does exist and is not written on edge of sketch, you'll see among the many guidelines that go into this very important rule because this can not just injure players but debilitate them, being struck from behind into an unforgiving hard surface. The offending player sees both of Wather Spoon's numbers, the two and the eight, and he proceeds anyway with the hit. He follows through with the hit. There's no let up. And the player goes down, but only after seeing his face get distorted against that same red section of the boards. And the same referees who'd end up having to correct Geno's call and I do mean correct

9:24to a major, it should have been a major. Watch this and said, eh, just two minutes. And it really, it would have meant so little to just call the five there. Score was four to one. Nobody would have been influencing anything, but they didn't get it right. And the reason that they didn't get it right is because they suck and the league and the department within that league that governs them also sucks. I'm sorry for the semi-crewed language, but there isn't anything I can say that would more accurately summarize this scenario because this stuff does come from the top, the lack of direction, the lack of clarity, the lack of reinforcement. And if you're going to ask me, what did this have to do with the penguins losing or this? Right now, my answer is I don't care. That's not what this commentary is about.

10:26This commentary is about the state of officiating in this league. And how bad not only the referees are, but how much worse the people over them are. And don't even get me started on how they treat rookie head coaches as if they're that important. They're nobody. They're nobody. At least they should be, as it relates to the event at hand when we come back, J1Q. Today's J1Q comes from Mike Rush, who says DKY would Gino do that especially with Sid being out into his contract, potentially under review, wow. There's going to be a lot of that. And I think there's going to be more of that, Mike, what you just brought up once the NHL

11:27determines the length of his suspension. And I have no doubt there will be a suspension because the next thing that will happen is, you know, there's weekend games against the flyers, the Bruins, one inside the division, the other inside the conference. And that road trip starts with a game in Raleigh against the only team ahead of the penguins in the Metro. And if there's a struggle in there in any form, it's going to be all about some combination of those evil Olympics or Gino doing this. So I think what Gino did is only going to get magnified among the fan base unless, of course, you know, the penguins prevail without both of their two living legends. But if you ask me that question in the most ice cold way, if you did, you didn't. I could answer it in the most ice cold way, which is that to repeat from the opening segment,

12:32three, not one, not two, but three different things happened to him. In the preceding 10 seconds, all three of them committed with a stick. And one of them, the first of those, the slash, I believe from the way he was shaking his hand and he shook his hand, by the way, while he was in the penalty box and the whole way off the ice once he was ejected, it might have done some damage. So all these things happen to him at once and he loses it. Is that okay? No. Does it lay out what actually happened or to your question, why would Gino do that? Yes. It's not like he took the ice for the third period, thinking, man, I would really like to break Rasmus Dollling's head open. And it's not like he apparently was even thinking about that during the shift or right after the slash because he just kept on playing, skated right around Dollling, right around him. But the second and the third came, and he's facing, by the way, the corner where firm

13:40in South is standing. Now I can't attest as to whether or not Gino would have noticed that South's right arm was staying down. Maybe he saw it, maybe, and maybe he just said, you know what, I can't with this anymore. I think this guy might have broken my finger. And it's not even going to get called and your wires just burst. They just do. Should they have? No. Did they? Yes. Now, to the rest of your question, is he going to be going through scenarios in his head like, yeah, but sits up in the press box and I really need to discipline myself. No. Is he going to be thinking about his contract, maybe being renewed or not? Wow. No. No. No. They are human. They do have emotions. They are expected to keep them under control.

14:42But they didn't all do that. If anyone among us here is a lip reader, you would have had to cover your eyes watching some of the words that were coming from Brian Rust, Chris Lattang, Parker Wather Spoon, and of course Dan Mews, through this game, any of them, any of them could have been hit with some sort of unsportsman like this or that. Did they lose it to an extent? Sure. But not to Geno's, obviously. He'll get his suspension. He'll serve it. He'll come back. He'll be Geno. My infinitely bigger issue. One last night was just the general incompetence between these referees, the replay room in Toronto, and really everybody who governs both right on up to Gary Petman. This gold tender interference problem isn't just kind of fade away for them. It's only getting worse, and the more examples there are, and you might have heard from

15:48my talk that I shared there with you in the opening segment with Ryan Shay. Players pay attention to stuff that happens around a leak. They see the way the same rules get applied in different cities to different teams on different nights. And this rule, this guideline is a massive mess, and it's not even being acknowledged by the league, much less addressed. I appreciate hearing from you, Mike. I appreciate everybody who listens to Daily Shot of Penguins. We're going to have a double shot of penguins today. That'll be at 3.30 p.m. conveniently timed, about a half hour after the NHL's trade deadline, which incidentally is when you do get the real final word on whether or not deals were made because deals can be made at 3 p.m. but not announced until a good bit later. So, we'll have that for you this afternoon, hope you can join us on the D.K.Pets

16:49Bricksports YouTube channel.