Chicago Blackhawks Reflect on Disallowed Goal Against Red Wings
By Josh Hill
It’s amazing what hindsight does. The Chicago Blackhawks are looking back on the controversial disallowed goal in Game 7 against the Detroit Red Wings with a smile and a shrug but in the moment they were livid and dumbfounded. What happened was officials disallowed what would have been a game winning goal for Niklas Hjalmarsson because of a scuffle developing in front of the Red Wings bench.
The shot when in the net, and the whistle was blown before that happened but the debate is over whether the whistle should have been blown and if it should have disallowed the goal since it appeared the Red Wings were instigating the incident.
Had the Blackhawks lost in overtime there likely would have been a riot of some sort as the season would have ended not because the Red Wings beat the Hawks but because the officials played a pivotal role in the outcome. But since Chicago did win it on a Brent Seabrook laser beam, everyone is able to look back at it with a lighter attitude than what was happening in the moment.
“I went blank,” Hjalmarsson, who scored the goal he thought had won the game but was disallowed, said. “I was so mad.”
Captain Jonathan Toews was noted for losing his cool more than once during the series against Detroit and his inability to keep calm was blamed for the Hawks mid-series skid that almost got them eliminated. He kept his cool when the goal was disallowed but he noted that he wasn’t the only guy on the Blackhawks bench who wanted to leap onto the ice and have a word with the officials.
“We were obviously pretty [expletive] off that the whistle blew right before that one went in,” Toews said, via the Chicago Sun-Times. “But we weren’t going to go away that way.”
The call will be one that will still be talked about long into the weekend but thankfully for the officials in Chicago, the Blackhawks won and the gravity of the error isn’t as severe as it could have been. Still, they may still want to avoid the city for a while as win or loss, the call goes down as one of the more dangerous errors to be made in a playoff hockey game.