The NHL made the right no-goal call on Andrei Vasilevskiy’s save

Tampa Bay goaltender Andrei Vasilevskiy made a last-second save in the Lightning’s win over Pittsburgh, but it wasn’t without controversy.

Andrei Vasilevskiy, the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Pittsburgh Penguins looked destined for overtime multiple times on Wednesday evening. The score was 2-2 between the two Eastern Conference teams headed into the final minute of the game, when Victor Hedman netted the go-ahead — and eventual game-winning — goal for the Lightning with a clapper from the blue line on a power play.

To the Penguins’ credit, Pittsburgh did not go quietly into the night. Instead, the Penguins pressed the advantage, pulling their netminder Tristan Jarry in favor of an extra attacker in the final seconds. The ploy nearly worked, as the Penguins made the Lightning scramble in their own zone for the remaining seconds of the period, but were ultimately held from tying the game thanks to the heroics of Tampa Bay netminder Andrei Vasilevskiy.

In the midst of a net-front pile up, Penguins defenseman Kris Letang took one last attempt at what seemed to be a wide open Lightning net, but met the glove of Vasilevskiy instead.

The acrobatic save came with less than a second left on the game clock, stunning the Penguins after nearly coming up with the tying goal. Letang can even be seen starting to celebrate what he believed to be his game-tying goal before the officials on the ice ruled it a save.

True to NHL form, the officials took a look at the play to see if, despite it being caught by Vasilevskiy, the puck had crossed the goal line while inside the Lightning goaltender’s glove.

After minutes of agonizing over pixelated footage of a top down shot of the save in question, the officials came away stating Vasilevskiy’s save would stand as called. Game over.

The moments leading up to NHL referee Tim Peel announcing the ruling were fascinating. The announcers on NBCSN’s broadcast, Eddie Olczyk and Brian Boucher specifically, believed that Vasilevskiy’s mid-air save had cleared the goal line and that the puck was across before time expired.

However, the video evidence shown on the broadcast were either from behind the goal line, exaggerating the angle in which the glove was over the goal line, or were too grainy to tell where the puck was in the sea of chaos in front of the Lightning net. The officials, and the War Room in Toronto, eventually came to the conclusion that there was no way to determine if the puck crossed the goal line, and released this statement to the media after the game ended.

"Video review could not determine that the puck completely crossed the goal line. Therefore, the Situation Room supported the Referee’s “no goal” call on the ice."

The call, overall, was the right one. No angle seen had conclusive evidence that the puck was over the goal line in the webbing of Vasilevskiy’s glove, despite it being clear that the puck was somewhere in his glove as it was traveling over the line during the movement of the save. We’ve seen situations similar to this before in the NHL, where the parallax view of the save in question showcases one view when the top-down angle shows another.

Also in this case, the grainy, pixelated footage of Vasilevskiy’s glove made it incredibly difficult to determine just what was being looked at when the puck and the glove are reduced to a blurry mess. Had the officials on the ice overturned the original call, it would have been hard to justify it given the quality of the footage shown.

After the game had ended, the Internet wondered if the NHL installing a rule such as the MLB’s “home run robbery” clause to allow goaltenders to make mid-air saves across the goal line without penalty would solve the muddy waters of this issue. Pucks that stay on the ice are a bit more cut-and-dry in determining where it is in relation to the goal line, so adding a bit more ruling to the mid-air save scenario adds clarity where there really hasn’t been any.

It’s an interesting proposal, but one that likely won’t catch on unless the NHL botches these rulings often in the future. In any case, the NHL got this ruling right after taking their time to look at it, postponing the inevitable officiating outrage in the hockey world for another day.