Dissecting the Brendan Gallagher hit: What’s the right punishment?

With Montreal Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher under fire for his late hit on New York Islanders defenseman Adam Pelech, the Department of Player Safety has indicated that Gallagher will not be receiving an in-person hearing, meaning he is subject to a maximum suspension of five games. Frank Servalli and Tyler Yaremchuk weigh in on the decision and what the right punishment is.

Tyler Yaremchuk: Frank, the Gallagher hit has X buzzing today, it’s been announced he won’t have an in-person hearing so the max the NHL can suspend Galagher is just five games. I am quite frankly stunned that he was not offered an in-person hearing as this was a very stupid play.

Frank Seravalli: Yeah it is, it’s a good player who made a poor decision. You look at the elbow and chicken wing that comes out and this is exactly the hit the NHL has done a really good job taking it out of the game. If you look at the last 10 years and how the game has evolved, we rarely see this anymore. I think a big reason for that is when Brendan Shanahan came in there were a lot of measures to put in place with the suspensions, and some of them big, which were pretty big deterrents away from this. The fact we see this hit pop up is jarring because we don’t see much of it recently. So then the next thing is, if we haven’t had many of those, which means the players have understood the message when someone steps out of line, what if the first you do is crack them back into it?

Frank Seravalli: That’s not the case, it will probably land in the four-to-five game range, and to take a step back and put my own view into this and how DOPS might look at this they’ll go “We aren’t in the 10-game range, but if we make it six we may as well make it five and we don’t have to do the in-person hearing.” I don’t agree with it or say that’s how they did, but if I’m thinking about it from their perspective if it’s not egregiously over six then draw the line and make it simpler for everyone involved.

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