Radko Gudas laid a nasty knee on knee hit on Auston Matthews, tearing his ACL and effectively ending his season. Just a few months after Charlie McAvoy returned from a gruesome face injury, he was on the receiving end of a nasty hit to the head on the boards by Sandis Vilmanis of the Panthers.
Players in the league and fans have been up in arms over Gudas receiving a measly 5 game suspension for the dirtiest hit in a long time, and no suspension at all for Vilmanis. Players like Connor McDavid have expressed their dismay with the DPS’s protocols and procedures when deciding suspension and punishments for dangerous plays. This has been an ongoing problem for years with the situation coming to a head recently. An unknown GM during a meeting with Gary Bettman loudly expressed his misgivings with the current procedure leading to a debacle with the league commissioner, though the DPS retains that everything is fine.
The players, coaches, and GM’s are obviously finally fed up with this broken system that allows players like Gudas to go back out in 5 games and play his same style of dirty hockey. There needs to be some sort of revisions to the suspension and punishment process and with some of the biggest names in the league speaking out against this, I don’t expect the league to be complacent for long.
Do you think there needs to be revisions to the way the DPS handles issues such as this? Why or why not?
