The Bruins’ 3-2 loss to the Wild Thursday night at TD Garden was, well, wild for a variety of reasons. There were 50 total penalty minutes. There were bad calls. There were missed calls. Each team had a full two-minute 5-on-3 power play in the first period. Only half of the game’s first 40 minutes were played at 5-on-5. There was an attempted Bruins comeback in the third.
But the biggest and most controversial play in the game was a hit Bruins forward Trent Frederic landed on Wild star Kirill Kaprizov midway through the second period.
After entering the Bruins’ zone, Kaprizov tried to spin away from Matt Grzelcyk. Frederic was closing fast on the backcheck and lined up Kaprizov for the hit. Kaprizov and Grzeclyk’s legs got tangled, and Kaprizov stumbled to the ice, putting him in a vulnerable position up against the boards. Frederic still finished the hit, sending Kaprizov -- who scored Minnesota's first goal of the game -- awkwardly into the boards.
Frederic was called for a two-minute minor for boarding. Minnesota defenseman Dmitry Kulikov immediately responded to the hit by dropping the gloves with Frederic, who won the fight convincingly. Kaprizov, meanwhile, was slow to get up and went straight to the locker room, with his right arm hanging limp at his side. The Wild’s leading scorer and last year’s Calder Trophy winner did not return to the game.
Frederic would have to answer for the hit again later in the game, this time dropping the gloves with Marcus Foligno -- brother of Frederic’s teammate, Nick. Foligno got the better of that bout.
After the game, the two sides unsurprisingly had very different takes on the hit. Frederic said he wasn’t trying to hurt Kaprizov and felt he was making a hockey play.
“I mean, he’s a good player. Obviously hope he’s all right. Obviously I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Frederic said. “I was just trying to make a hockey play and finish a check. I haven’t really seen it, but I think he kind of fell as I was doing it. It’s hard to kind of pull off that. Hope he’s all right.”
His coach, Bruce Cassidy, said he didn’t see any “malicious intent” in the hit and thought it was clean.
“It looks like he [Kaprizov] turned away from Grizz in a one-on-one situation,” Cassidy said. “Freddy was tracking back into the zone. I don’t know if he stumbled, Kaprizov, or ducked. That part I don’t know. I don’t know the player well enough. But Freddy sort of leaned into him. I don’t think there was any malicious intent, other than separating him from the puck, which you better do or he’ll hurt you. You just have to do it in a legal manner.
“I thought it looked clean from my point. They didn’t see it that way. Obviously Minnesota’s gonna react. It’s one of their best players. I get that. We would do the same. But I didn’t think there was anything malicious in the hit, personally. He got nailed for a two-minute boarding. I don’t know if it was a boarding or not, but that’s the way they saw it.”
Meanwhile, Minnesota coach Dean Evason saw the play completely differently. He called Frederic’s hit “predatorial” and “not a hockey play” and wants the NHL’s Department of Player Safety to take a closer look at it. Evason didn’t have an update on Kaprizov’s injury other than to say it “doesn’t look good.”
“Really frustrated with how Kirill got hurt,” Evason said. “It’s a predatorial hit. It’s one that the league -- we don’t want that, right? The puck is sitting right there. You know what he’s doing. He’s going to hurt our best player. There’s no question, there’s no intention -- that is not a hockey play. The puck’s sitting right there. All he has to do is take the puck and go. And in a vulnerable position, you hit a player from behind. We see it all the time, and it gets taken care of. And I hope it gets taken care of here.”
Kulikov, the player who immediately jumped in to fight Frederic, echoed his coach’s sentiments, saying it looked like a “dirty hit” to him.
“I didn’t watch it back, but to me on the ice, it looked like a dirty hit,” Kulikov said. “He was coming in and Kirill was in a vulnerable position, and he still went for a hit. You don’t want to see a teammate go down like that. Just unfortunate that he left the game.”
We should find out sometime Friday if Frederic will have a hearing with the league about possible supplemental discipline.
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