Panthers Robbed of Game-Tying Goal

The Florida Panthers lost to the Atlanta Thrashers, 3-2, on Wednesday night in a game the Panthers felt should have, at the very least, gone into overtime.

With a little over six minutes to play in the third period, with the Panthers trailing by one goal, defenseman Bryan McCabe fired a shot at Thrashers goaltender Ondrej Pavelec that appeared to be stopped and covered for a whistle. Upon further review, however, the puck can clearly be seen across the goal line, tucked inside the side of the net. Neither referee called it a goal, and despite the protests of McCabe, the play was never sent to the Toronto war room for review (or reviewed at all). The puck was quickly dropped for the ensuing faceoff and the Panthers never scored again.

Said coach Pete DeBoer after the game, "It looks like a goal to me and I'm baffled why the referees can make certain to make sure everyone goes to the box but why no one took a second look at it. They look at everything else. I got no explanation why. They said if it was close, Toronto would have buzzed them. They never got that."

Said McCabe, via George Richards of the Miami Herald: "I don't know if they could have dropped the puck any quicker. I didn't see the replay but I thought it was in. They dropped the puck in about four seconds. What can you do? I thought it went in. His pad was in the net, the puck was in the net. We didn't get many breaks, many calls tonight."

At the 47-second mark of the above video you can clearly see the puck sitting inside the net. Blown call. Bad call. Should have been reviewed. Should have been a goal.

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Not that it does the Panthers any good at this point, but Richards reports on Thursday morning that the NHL's Mike Murphy said the play should have been reviewed, and even though they saw the play, did not review it because they saw the on-ice call was no-goal and were not alerted to review it. He also added that by the time they saw the puck in the net, play had already started again, and that it would have been difficult to overturn since you can't really see how (and when) the puck went into the net relative to the whistle.

Based on what I can see, the puck went directly into the net so the whistle shouldn't have been an issue. Still, this situation illustrates quite the flaw in the Toronto War Room replay system.