Mark Scheifele's skate came up and clipped Connor Clifton in the face last night, a scary moment in the Jets' home opener against Boston.
The good news: Clifton was unharmed.
Skate blades and faces don't mix, and both benches knew exactly how bad it could have been.
Nothing about the sequence suggests intent. Scheifele's skate came up during the play, and Clifton happened to be in the wrong spot at the wrong moment.
The Bruins defenceman, 31, had already played in Boston's 3-0 opening win over the Rangers.
In the clip, Scheifele's skate comes up off the ice and catches Clifton up high, the kind of sequence that makes a whole building go quiet.
-
Scott Arniel's Jets lean on Scheifele with the crease in limbo
Scheifele is coming off a 103-point season, with 36 goals in all 82 games.
He's 33 and has spent all 961 of his NHL games in Winnipeg.
The Jets need him healthy and rolling while the Connor Hellebuyck trade talk keeps swirling around this team.
Nobody should be calling for supplemental discipline here. This was a hockey accident, and treating it like anything else would be wrong.
It's like a rake left teeth-up in the yard. Nobody means for it to happen, but everybody knows how it could end.
Winnipeg heads to Detroit on Sunday afternoon, then Pittsburgh on Monday. Boston visits Minnesota on Saturday.
Clifton got lucky. In a sport played on blades, the next one might not end with everybody skating away safely, especially when a split-second collision changes everything on the ice.
Should the NHL review Mark Scheifele's skate clipping Connor Clifton?
Also read on Markerzone.com:
Big Dylan Larkin news hits Detroit after the game as what we thought is now all but confirmed
