THE ROUNDUP- PLAYOFF EDITION- APR 30/19

ST LOUIS BLUES 4 DALLAS STARS 3- (St Louis leads 2-1)

Last night’s Blues win was a back and forth contest with a wild 3rd period, and one of the dumbest moments of the playoffs, but let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Early goal? Check. Jaden Schwartz with his 6th of the playoffs less than 2 minutes into the first.

Jay Bouwmeester would take a tripping call late in the first, and Alexander Radulov would tie it up on the ensuing PP.

Onto the 2nd period, where Tyler Bozak restores the Blues lead:

And then we get this from the Stars’ Esa Lindell and the Blues Robert Bortuzzo:

This may surprise you, but it elicited some emotions on Twitter. Weird, right? Between Dallas fans invoking the name of Todd Bertuzzi, to the overreaction of the tweet above, the whole thing was ridiculous.

Here’s the thing. There’s 3 idiots here. The guy who made this tweet, Esa Lindell, and Robert Bortuzzo. The guy who unleashed this tweet just needs to log off and re-evaluate his life, because that’s an unfathomably stupid take. Lindell is an idiot because those dives were ridiculous, and he should be fined for them. And Bortuzzo’s an idiot because his focus was entirely on crying to the ref after he drills the guy twice and pushes him once. Diving sucks, but it’s the playoffs and guys do this to try and win. It’s a fact and all teams do it. It doesn’t make it right, but it’s one of the crappy aspects of this whole challenge to get that hunk of silver. The fact that Bortuzzo isn’t even getting involved in the puck battle in the corner and continues on this quest to get the refs to call a dive on Lindell while somehow not thinking that his crosschecks might actually get called shows he’s about as bright as 8 pounds of ground chuck in a wet paper bag.

So we move on to the 3rd, and then it actually gets wild, as the teams start trading goals. Andrew Cogliano with a shorty at 13:06 gets it started.

Just over a minute later, Alex Pietrangelo responds to restore the Blues lead.

But the Stars tie it again as Tyler Seguin gets that one back:

With about a minute and a half to go, we get the winner by Patrick Maroon.

And if you don’t think the hockey gods exist, check out Maroon clearly interfering with Lindell, who is then out of position to stop Maroon from beating Ben Bishop.

That deserved a call. There ain’t a ref on this planet that’s gonna give it to Lindell after all that. And that is why you don’t dive, kids. Game 4 goes Wednesday night in Dallas.