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The Roundup- Stanley Cup Playoffs Edition: May 10/19

If you had bad officiating as the winner last night, you’re not clairvoyant, you’ve just been watching the playoffs so far. The Bruins get bailed out by baffling calls to get the win, which totally never happened before.

By Kent Basky
/ new
Carolina Hurricanes v Boston Bruins - Game One Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images

BOSTON BRUINS 5 CAROLINA HURRICANES 2- (Boston leads 1-0)

Look, we know there’s no conspiracy because there’s not enough brilliant minds running this show to be able to pull something like that off, but it sure does look weird that one of the teams that seems to benefit the most from bad officiating is the Boston Bruins. Whether it’s perfectly timed power play opportunities or a sudden lack of vision during all manner of heinous on-ice attacks on opposition players, the ‘Big, Bad Bruins’ seem to get a big, bad hand when they need it most. Now this isn’t nearly as much an issue if Carolina is able to kill off those penalties (thus the reasoning that there’s no conspiracy) but it is tiresome to see a team go through the playoffs cheapshotting their merry way while their opponents get called for stuff like this:

Unreal. Your guess is as good as mine why the officiating has been consistently bad this post-season (and let’s be fair, the Bruins did get hosed on a couple non-calls, but holy shit there is no way in hell those are penalties in a pre-season game let alone a game in the 3rd round of the playoffs).

Anyway, in the actual hockey part of the game, Stephen Kampher opened the scoring:

Shortly after that though the Bruins took a penalty when Sean Kuraly got a little over-exuberant with Brock McGinn, and it took the Hurricanes, who have struggled on the PP all playoffs, exactly 3 seconds to score.

The ‘Canes would take the lead in the 2nd when (checking to make sure this guy is a real person first) Greg McKegg scored a beauty:

The comes the 3rd and suddenly Dougie Hamilton (the focus of around 90% of the Boston media’s attention heading into this series, curiously) is getting penalized for everything he does. The Bruins score twice on the PP and add an empty netter and a garbage time goal and that’s your final score.

I don’t think there’s any reason for panic in Carolina. They outplayed the Bruins for great stretches of this game last night, and they went down 2-0 against Washington and survived that. They’re just going to have to not get sucked into taking penalties as much as they can and hopefully this same officiating crew isn’t involved for the rest of the series because they were bloody awful.

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