NHL Player Safety Hands Out Maximum Fine to Lightning Players After Heated Florida Clash
Photo credit: Nathan Ray Seebeck-Imagn Images
The NHL Player Safety Department had a field day with the Tampa Bay/Florida game but only managed to hand out a couple of fines after the dust settled.
If you missed the insane fracas that happened between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers, you found yourself absent from one of the craziest games in recent memory.
312 PIM, 16 ejections, and a 7-0 Florida win all made for some of the most entertaining yet bizarre hockey in recent memory.
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But in all that craziness, only two players ended up receiving punishment from the Player Safety Department, as they felt the ejections and waning preseason was enough.
Both Tampa's Gage Goncalves and Roman Schmidt were the casualties of the Player Safety Department, and it puts a close to one of the wildest contests so far this year.
All in all, 65 total penalties were assessed including several game misconducts, and the NHL official summary of the game reads more like an index for a textbook as opposed to a scoresheet:
Suffice to say both teams are not big fans of each other, and it sets the tone for the entirety of the regular season, where stakes are higher.
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Both teams are going to be neck and neck with each other all year, so you can best believe that tension is going to grow.
There were no suspensions handed out which is a positive for the Panthers, who can't really afford to have any more players out whilst Matthew Tkachuk and Aleksander Barkov out long-term.
But it's a lesson to the Lightning and other teams that while the punishment might not be expensive compared to their contracts, if you get repeated infractions you're going to get in trouble.
Florida and Tampa are going to have all eyes on the from the league throughout the entire season, and if this game was any indication of their hatred:
Expect much more fireworks and many more fines (or worse) in the near future.
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