DALLAS — As Joe Pavelski lay motionless behind the Wild net in the second period of the Stars’ 3-2 double-overtime Game 1 loss Monday night, two moments flashed through my mind.
First, April 23, 2019. In an image that looked eerily similar, Pavelski, then with the San Jose Sharks, lay motionless on the ice in the first round of the 2019 playoffs against the Vegas Golden Knights, a pool of blood forming on the ice around his head area.
Second, Dec. 18, 2021. Joe Pavelski stood at the podium at the American Airlines Center, unable to hold back tears as he tried to answer a question about a hit his Dallas teammate Tanner Kero took against the Chicago Blackhawks.
Joe Pavelski when asked about Tanner Kero, who left the game in the first period after a scary hit. pic.twitter.com/db6K4O6Ch6
— Saad Yousuf (@SaadYousuf126) December 19, 2021
As those moments briefly resurfaced, Pavelski, still down on the ice, slowly started to move. Eventually, he got up. With a Stars staffer to his left and Mason Marchment to his right, Pavelski gingerly made his way toward the Stars bench. He didn’t stop there; Pavelski went straight down the tunnel and didn’t return to the game.
“Joe’s OK,” Stars head coach Pete DeBoer said after the game.
When asked if OK meant he was confident in Pavelski’s status for Game 2, DeBoer was clear.
“No, I’m not confident for Game 2,” DeBoer said. “He’s OK, (like) he’s ‘walking out of the rink on his own’ OK.”
In outlining these moments, I am not drawing comparisons between Dumba’s hit on Pavelski on Monday and Cody Eakin’s cross-check on Pavelski in 2019 or Brett Connolly’s hit on Kero in 2021. They were all different in nature, as well as circumstance. The commonality they do share is the sobering image of a man laying on the ice with a serious head injury.
On Monday, officials initially called Dumba for a five-minute major, which gave them a chance to review the play. Ironically, their ability to do that came from a rule that was put in place after Eakin’s hit on Pavelski in 2019. Eakin was assessed a major penalty and game misconduct. The Sharks scored four goals in the following minutes to come back from a 3-0 deficit to win Game 7 5-4 in overtime. The league apologized to the Golden Knights, saying Eakin’s infraction did not warrant a major but there was no way to review the call at the time. In Pavelski’s first comments on that hit a few weeks later, he agreed.
“I have no issues with that play,” Pavelski said in May 2019. “Was it a five-minute major? No. Was I happy they called it that way? Heck yeah.”
After looking at Dumba’s hit on Pavelski, officials rescinded the major and assigned Dumba a two-minute minor for roughing. Max Domi, who admitted he didn’t see the hit itself, pounced on Dumba as a reaction to seeing Pavelski laying on the ice in the manner in which he was.
Immediate aftermath. Stars pounced, led by Max Domi. pic.twitter.com/tL5b63KaHT
— Saad Yousuf (@SaadYousuf126) April 18, 2023
“One of your best players goes down like that, that’s hockey,” Domi said of his decision to fight Dumba. “Hope (Joe) is OK … I saw Joe laying there and you never want to see a teammate, especially a guy like that, down there.”
Domi was also given two minutes for roughing and a 10-minute misconduct. All in all, when play resumed, it was two minutes of four-on-four and then back to normal.
“You never want to see that, I don’t care who you’re playing against,” Wild head coach Dean Evason said. “You don’t want to see anybody get hurt. I’m glad that we have video review because it looks like he hits him in the head but obviously, if you watch it, the stick hits him. Obviously, we believe they got it right but you still don’t want to see anybody lay on the ice like that.”
Stars head coach Pete DeBoer, who was the Sharks head coach in 2019 when Eakin cross-checked Pavelski, also deferred to the review.
“We have the best officials in the world,” DeBoer said. “They called a five, they reviewed it, which is the right thing to do. If they reviewed it and they decided it wasn’t a bad hit, then I guess it’s not for me to argue with that. They got to look at it at multiple different angles and that’s the decision they made.”
It’s worth noting that over the weekend, DeBoer was asked if he, as a head coach, can manage a team’s emotions to have a deep playoff run.
“As a coach, you can set the table a little bit with that with how you manage situations,” DeBoer said.
He harkened back to a lesson he learned in the 2019 postseason as the Sharks head coach. He recalled when his Sharks were tied 1-1 in a series with the Blues and in Game 3, the Sharks won in overtime on a controversial goal when the referees missed a hand pass by Erik Karlsson.
“I remember watching (Blues head coach) Craig Berube, how he handled that situation,” DeBoer said. “If he had gone off the rails, maybe his team goes off the rails. He was so consistent and so calm in his messaging about it in getting ready for the next play and the next game and not to dwell on it. His team, I thought, worked off of his reaction. They ended up beating us and winning the Stanley Cup against Boston that year. I thought that was a key moment.”
Maybe DeBoer truly does feel content with the decision made by the officials. Maybe he’s playing it cool publicly to make sure his team stays composed, as he saw Berube do four years ago. Either way, DeBoer took the right stance when asked about it after the game, especially after seeing how emotional of a moment it was for the Stars in how Domi and others reacted.
For his part, Dumba also felt it was a clean hit and was confident that the officials would see it that way as well — shoulder to shoulder, finishing his check. Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger disagreed.
“From what I saw, it looked like a major penalty,” Oettinger said. “I’ll look at it (again) and I don’t think my opinion is going to change. It’s tough, you lose your leader like that, a guy we need, to a cheap shot like that. It’s tough. Hopefully he’s not hurt too bad and we can use it as motivation to help us.”
Opinions on Dumba’s hit on Pavelski were polarizing. A couple of former respected NHL players on the broadcast of the game signed off on it. Wild fans certainly agreed with that assessment. Stars fans, for the most part, disagreed.
“You hate to see players get hurt, but this is a part of the game,” former star defenseman P.K. Subban said on ESPN.
Fine. Maybe that hit is part of the game. If it is, it shouldn’t be.
Before even getting to the body parts involved, there’s no question Dumba’s hit was late and entirely avoidable. Pavelski has gotten rid of the puck and it’s already distinctly far from Pavelski. Below, you can see that even after Pavelski has gotten rid of the puck, Dumba is in a squat position.
For those saying he was just “finishing his check,” Dumba hasn’t even started it, and the puck is nowhere close to Pavelski. For those mentioning how fast the game is, obviously game speed is intense. But notice how Dumba’s defensive partner, Jonas Brodin, goes from watching Pavelski to watching the puck inches from the outside of the net. The puck ricochets off the net and bounces back. At this point, Dumba still hasn’t made contact with Pavelski.
That is more than enough time for Dumba to ease up. Dumba opts to do the opposite. Again, forget for a minute about the body parts directly involved in the hit. Dumba clearly goes from a squat position and launches himself upward into Pavelski’s head area.
If that’s legal, that’s embarrassing. Many defending the hit while expressing sympathy for Pavelski’s head injury say the hit was shoulder to shoulder and the blow to the head came after, when Pavelski’s head clearly makes direct contact with the ice. From one angle, it certainly looked like Dumba’s shoulder blasted Pavelski’s head, but that’s really not the point here.
The point is a number of hockey gatekeepers will choose to resort to saying those frustrated with the hit don’t know hockey, haven’t played hockey, are trying to ruin the game or something of the sort. Nobody is trying to take physicality out of hockey. It’s part of what makes the sport beautiful and what so many people, myself included, enjoy. But to act like there’s nothing that can be done to calibrate that physicality is disingenuous. It’s rooted in hockey culture, rooted in the players themselves, that being tough is the only option, even if it’s detrimental. If that means playing through a broken foot or a torn hip labrum or a bad hip, so be it. Just ask Roope Hintz, Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn, respectively. That culture is a discussion for another day but head injuries are an entirely different animal.
To compare Dumba’s hit to another combat sport, it would be the most basic unnecessary roughness penalty in the NFL for a safety and would undoubtedly get a player ejected for targeting in college football. The timing of that hit in relation to a defensive lineman would draw a roughing-the-passer flag 10 out of 10 times. Calibrating physicality is not eliminating it.
Dumba is a player who’s known for playing on the edge. One month ago, it was a hit on Evgeny Kuznetsov.
Matt Dumba lowers the boom on Evgeny Kuznetsov pic.twitter.com/FC7cqDFX3X
— Gino Hard (@GinoHard_) March 19, 2023
A few weeks later it was Drew O’Connor.
Way late and unnecessary hit from Dumba on O’Connor – direct head contact. pic.twitter.com/d2uXswt1I5
— Jim (@SportsingJim) April 6, 2023
Less than two weeks after that, it was Pavelski. I’m not here to issue verdicts on Dumba or try to figure out his intent. I don’t think he was trying to knock Pavelski out of the game. At least, I sure hope he wasn’t. But what’s indisputable is that Dumba’s hit was late, it was vicious and it was completely unnecessary.
For those who think this is acceptable, or especially part of “playoff hockey,” it may be time to reevaluate. If seeing Pavelski motionless and dazed on the ice in San Jose and in Dallas — not to mention visibly traumatized and emotional at the podium — is something that’s just seen as a byproduct of the game, the game needs to be altered.
Stars fans will paint Dumba as the villain, and understandably so, to some degree. Many of them also need to have an honest conversation with themselves about how they would view this situation if it was a Stars player delivering the blow. Would you be quick to hide behind the legality of the hit or would you find the humanity to see the ridiculousness?
Because Dumba isn’t the actual problem here. The NHL can’t even muster the fortitude to admit a relationship between brain injuries and CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. How can you try to solve a problem when you don’t even recognize that it exists?
Dumba is a product of the problem, which is a league and culture that continues to enable, promote and encourage horrific scenes like the one that took place again in Dallas.
(Photo: Tom Pennington / Getty Images)
