NEW YORK — The point of instant replay is to get calls right, which is exactly what happened Sunday night, and Jonathan Huberdeau knew it.
“I thought I was offside when it happened,” Huberdeau said. “(The linesman) said it was not, so we just played it. It was really close.”
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Huberdeau’s skate crossed the Islanders’ blue line a fraction of a second before the puck did, so after Aaron Ekblad scored a goal that appeared to give the Panthers a three-goal lead in Game 3 of the first-round series, New York got a bigger psychological boost from the goal coming off the board than if the play had simply been whistled down as it should have been. The Islanders went on to win, 4-3, in overtime on a goal by Thomas Hickey.
Just a couple of minutes after Ekblad’s erased goal, the Islanders scored their first goal of the night, and a game that for a few fleeting moments had been 3-0 was 2-1 instead.
“They scored, but we scored right back to make it 3-1,” said Panthers goalie Roberto Luongo, who made 35 saves in defeat. “We just got into some penalty trouble there, and started not managing the puck as good as we should for the last 10 minutes of the second, and it cost us.”
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The Panthers did get a goal from Nick Bjugstad, 2:02 after Ryan Pulock had gotten the Islanders on the board on a 5-on-3, but goals from Shane Prince at even strength and Frans Nielsen on a power play tied the game for New York. And while Luongo dismissed the idea that the video reversal got the Islanders back into the game, the Isles themselves embraced it.
“I think after the call by our video coach to overturn that goal, I think the crowd took that and gave us a boost of energy and we came back,” Islanders defenseman Nick Leddy said. “It was a little bit of a downer (when Bjugstad scored), but you just have to keep going and being relentless,” Islanders defenseman Nick Leddy said. “You keep doing the right things, and we did do it, and we got rewarded.”
Said Pulock: “It was a big play. Down 3-0 in the playoffs, that’s tough. To be able to get that goal overturned and be able to score quickly after that, it got us back in the game fast.”
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You can believe what you want to believe about how momentum works in sports. The important thing is that an incorrect call was reversed.
Had Ekblad’s goal stood, perhaps the Panthers might have gone on to a 6-0 rout, or maybe something else would have stirred the Islanders to raise their game, and they might have rallied to send the contest to overtime anyway. Had Brett Hull’s goal in 1999 been overturned, maybe the Stars would have won the Stanley Cup anyway, either in Game 6 or in that Game 7, but Buffalo would have had the chance to play on.
That’s just the thing for all the critics of replay who say that it could ruin the excitement of a Stanley Cup-deciding goal. We’ve seen before what happens when replay is not used on a controversial goal to clinch the Cup. Getting it right, even with a slight delay, is a much better idea.
In the case of Sunday night, the replay reversal changed the complexion of a game and maybe a series. There might be something to dislike in the utilization of replay being a strategic element in the form of coaches’ challenges, but there’s nothing to dislike about the results being correct calls, and refreshing honesty from a player who knew he was offside, and knew when it went to replay that his team was going to lose a goal.