Matthew Tkachuk has built a career on operating at the edge of what officials will tolerate. In Buffalo on Monday, supporters watching the Florida Panthers‘ 5-3 loss decided he had gone well past it.
The target was Zach Benson, which is part of why the clip has traveled. The Sabres winger is listed at 5-foot-10 and 177 pounds, among the smallest forwards in the league, and Tkachuk gives away neither size nor experience to him. Tkachuk pulled the helmet clean off his head and skated away from it without consequence.
Is removing a player’s helmet a penalty?
Supporters watching certainly believed it should have been, and said so in volume.
“Taking a player’s helmet off is supposed to be an automatic penalty. Shocking that a Panthers player gets away with this nonsense,” one wrote.
“I am shocked that this wasn’t called. Refs are blind again,” another said.
Several widened it into a complaint about how the sport is being officiated this season, with the jersey-tuck crackdown that caught Trevor Zegras last month sitting awkwardly alongside incidents like this one.
“Reffing is at an all time low this year. Calls for equipment BS but actual muggings go unnoticed,” one fan wrote.
“The Panthers reffing makes a mockery of the game. I get that they don’t want to call everything and make the penalties lopsided, but at some point you have to preserve the integrity of the game,” another added.
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One pointed the finger at coaches rather than officials. “At this point I’m just trying to figure out why none of the coaches have come out against this crap yet. I know they’d get fined, but I’ve seen them accept fines for less.”
It isn’t the first time this season that a Tkachuk has drawn this reaction. Brady Tkachuk escaped any penalty beyond a fighting major after putting Macklin Celebrini down from behind in San Jose earlier this month.
Florida has now lost four of five and sits at 2-2-2. Benson finished Monday with two assists, including the secondary on Noah Ostlund‘s game-winning power-play goal, while Matthew Tkachuk collected two of his own and Brady Tkachuk recorded his first point as a Panther in six games.
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