People seem shocked that the Carolina Hurricanes are playing a rough brand of hockey tonight. A couple of reasons here — they have Tuomo Ruutu, who is notorious for sneaky injury causing plays (more on that in a sec); they have Eric Staal, who tends to make bad decisions when annoyed by teams more physical than he is; and they are in a three way tie for last place in the division.
The aforementioned Ruutu injury causing play was on Andy McDonald, unfortunately. The goal scoring, play making waterbug was shoved into the boards by Ruutu, sans call.
McDonald left the game clutching his shoulder and hasn’t returned since.
The pressure during the game was too much for captain Staal to handle; having McDonald injured woke the Blues up. Some rough shoving turned into two minor penalties: one for slashing and one for tripping with less than twenty minutes to go in the period. Unfortunately, Pietrangelo negated two minutes of that with a retaliatory check on Bryan Allen. Allen hit Oshie open ice, and it looked as though he got his arm a bit high on the hit. Pietrangelo took exception and skated by to hit Allen, killing two minutes of the man advantage.
The Blues had 12 shots to Carolina’s 7 that period, putting the game’s shot total at 25-19 St. Louis.