Kris Letang was battling Sam Dickinson for a puck in the corner at the SAP Center on Wednesday, trying to get a whistle, when the officials decided he was the one holding a stick. The call came at 4:17 of overtime, with 43 seconds left on the clock, and handed San Jose a power play to win it.
Letang had a view on this, and he delivered it from inside the box with the cameras on him.
The footage needs no transcript. He gestured repeatedly toward his own groin area, apparently indicating where Dickinson’s stick had been, while working through a vocabulary that television generally prefers not to carry.
Letang’s night:
| Ice time | Assists | Penalty minutes | Time left when called |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20:36 | 1 | 2 | 0:43 |
Why was Kris Letang penalized in overtime?
The Pensburgh account of the sequence has considerably more sympathy for him than the officials did. It describes Letang battling a man who was digging his stick into him aggressively, and being sent off for holding that stick in response.
It was also the second time inside a minute that Dickinson had nearly ended the game. Sergei Murashov had stopped him on a breakaway moments earlier.
The 22-year-old goaltender then killed the penalty, finished with 34 saves on 36 shots, and denied Will Smith in the third round of the shootout. Ben Kindel had already scored the only goal of it, going wide down the left wing before cutting in and beating Yaroslav Askarov five-hole.
The Pittsburgh Penguins needed all of that because they had thrown away a two-goal lead. Macklin Celebrini pulled one back at 11:32 of the third, reaching 200 career points and becoming the fifth-youngest player in league history to get there, and Mason Marchment tied it with 4:11 left for his 100th career goal.
Pittsburgh won 3-2 for a second win in three, moving to 7-10-2. The San Jose Sharks have lost six of seven.
Letang logged 20:36 and picked up an assist on Samuel Girard‘s opening goal. The two minutes were his only penalty of the night, which seems unlikely to be how he remembers it.
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