Pospisil's antics can ignite a club but his style comes with a cost at some point — paid by him on the ice or the club on the scoresheet
On a night most of his Calgary Flames teammates needed a shot in the arm, Martin Pospisil tried to provide it a few seconds after the puck was dropped in Monday’s clash with the Seattle Kraken.
Pospisil’s crushing check on Adam Larsson was deemed clean by the officials, and put the Flames agitator on Seattle’s watch list the rest of the game.
When Seattle’s Tye Kartye decided in the second period Pospisil should answer for it and used him as a punching bag, Pospisil refused to punch back, which resulted in a Flames power play during which Andrei Kuzmenko scored his first of two goals.
That is what Pospisil can provide. But with the good in his shift-disturber antics can come the bad, and with his team frantically working for a comeback from its 4-2 deficit, Pospisil essentially ended those hopes with a hit from behind on Vince Dunn with six minutes remaining. Understandably, the Kraken were still irate after the final buzzer.
“Garbage,” Kraken coach Dave Hakstol said. “But not really a whole lot different than the first hit six or seven seconds into the game. You run around like that you probably need to answer when somebody comes to you man-to-man and that didn't happen either, so from there I'll leave it to the league. I thought both hits were just about as bad as you get.”
Flames coach Ryan Huska said post-game he hadn’t reviewed it, but the league's department of player safety announced a hearing would be held on Wednesday. It is likely the NHL will suspend the rookie winger for a couple of outings during the team’s three-game road trip, and maybe even all of it.
Pospisil’s style of game has been part of the NHL for decades: an effective pest. As is the case with most of them, the frustration stems from players of that ilk rarely answering with a fight, as per the code of the game. In Pospisil’s case, his concussion history — which began from being knocked unconscious by a punch from Colby Cave during an AHL game — makes it very real his next could be the end of his career.
So, either Pospisil will at some point answer to frontier justice or ensure he does not cross the line. He received a match penalty for a chicken-wing hit on Winnipeg’s Cole Perfetti in the pre-season, and was ejected for a cross-checking major on Boston’s Brad Marchand Feb. 6. Pospisil was not suspended for either of those incidents.
“He’s learning his way right now, I guess is what you can say,” Huska said. “For the majority part of the year, he’s been walking the line on the right side of it for sure. He’s done a really good job with that. He brings a lot to our team in regards to physicality and making sure he’s prepared to play.”
