Nikita Zadorov Killed A Guy Last Night
Poor Ondrej Kase. Buddy has been getting all sorts of bundled out there lately. First there was this knee-on-knee hit from Brendan Smith on Monday night.
And then last night he found himself stuck on the tracks while the Z Train was pulling through. Smashed the eject button on the bucket and everything.
And that, my friends, is what we call a hospital pass. The thing is that I don't think Kase's teammates necessarily hate him or anything. I mean after both of these hits, he immediately had a teammate step up and fight the guy who buried him. So clearly the Leafs want to step up and defend the guy. But at the very least, Pierre Engvall must not care about him too much. Because he just set his own guy up to get capital M Murdered out there with reckless abandon.
Great hit, though. Ain't nothing wrong with that one. Was it a little high? Maybe. But every hit is going to be high for 6'6" Nikita Zadorov. It's not like he targeted the head or anything. He's just a massive human being, and Kase's head targeted Zadorov's shoulder more than anything. Clean hit, led with the shoulder down, I think the helmet popping off made this look significantly worse than what it actually was. Which is why it's bullshit that Zadorov had to sit in the box after this hit. Luckily he was only given a matching roughing penalty with Morgan Rielly and didn't have to sit for 5 minutes for fighting. But I'm of the belief that if you drill a dude with a perfectly clean hit and then you have to deal with one of his teammates trying to fight you afterwards, you shouldn't receive a fighting penalty for that. I'm sick of every big hit landing guys in the box because the other team thinks it was too mean.
Flames won 5-2, by the way.