The NHL may have just made the most controversial call of the playoffs
Lane Hutson and Martin St-Louis got dragged into Game 6 chaos when a tripping call on Josh Norris somehow came with embellishment on Hutson too.
That is why this one blew up so fast.
The Canadiens came into the night up 3-2 in the series, one win from the Eastern Conference Final, and the first period already turned into total noise with 5 goals on the board.
Then came the call that made no sense to half the building.
If Norris tripped Hutson, people wanted to know how Hutson could also be guilty of selling it. That is the part fans could not get past.
The replay only poured more fuel on it. Hutson got clipped, went down, and instead of a clean Montreal power play, the sequence became another officiating fight in a series already drowning in those arguments.
Here is the clip :
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Fans are absolutely losing it over the NHL's latest playoff decision
Another one hammered the same point from Montreal's side:
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That is the whole controversy in one line. If the officials saw enough contact to send Norris off for tripping, the embellishment tag on Hutson turned the decision into a contradiction.
And because this was Hutson, not some random depth player, the reaction hit even harder. Montreal fans already see him as one of the team's smartest puck movers, not a guy spending shifts fishing for calls.
The other side had no patience for that argument. One reaction making the rounds said :
Another fan posted a pool-flop GIF with the caption,
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This tells you exactly how fast the internet turned the play into a joke war.
That is playoff hockey now. One whistle, one weird ruling, and the entire game flow gets hijacked by the argument around it.
The timing made it worse. In a first period with 5 goals already flying in, nobody wanted the officials adding more chaos to a game that was already completely off the rails.
For St-Louis, the anger is obvious. In a closeout game at home, your team earns a trip and still ends up with your young star defenseman wearing a label that questions his honesty.
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That is why this one will stay hot. People can debate whether Hutson went down easy. But once tripping is called too, the embellishment part is where the whole thing starts to wobble.
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MAY 16, 2026
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| G | A | PTS | ||
| Rasmus Dahlin | 1 | 4 | 5 | |
| Tage Thompson | 1 | 3 | 4 | |
| Jack Quinn | 2 | 1 | 3 | |
| Zach Benson | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Jake Evans | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Jason Zucker | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| Ivan Demidov | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Konsta Helenius | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Zach Metsa | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Arber Xhekaj | 1 | - | 1 | |
| Bowen Byram | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Cole Caufield | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Lane Hutson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Michael Matheson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Ryan McLeod | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Josh Norris | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Mattias Samuelsson | - | 1 | 1 | |
| Josh Anderson | - | - | - | |
| Zachary Bolduc | - | - | - | |
| Alexandre Carrier | - | - | - | |
| COMPLETE STATS | ||||