St. Louis Blue forward (and former MSUM Maverick) David Backes will test the waters again on the disciplinary discussion about lateral blindside hits on vulnerable unsuspecting players. In this case, star Red Wing Defenseman and former Badger Brian Rafalski.
I shouldn't trivialize this because this hit was rough. Backes comes up behind and to the right of Rafalski passing through center ice and absolutely crushes him shoulder to jaw right above the Blues blue line. The camera barely caught it.
Here it is:
You can just barely see it at the far right of the screen. There was no replay of the hit until NHL on the Fly pointed it out. In fact, I didn't even notice it because I was too busy watching Fippula undress the Blues D.
Again, no call. Again, not a penalty as Rafalski was playing the puck at the time. Again, should've been a penalty...and now will be under the new rule.
No idea if Rafalski was injured on the play. It is identical to the Cooke-Savard tragedy except the force of impact was less (imo) and Backes is known for big hits, but not cheap shots, so the intent, as far as I'm concerned, wasn't to try to knock Rafalski into next season (see Cooke, Matt on Savard and Ovechkin, Alex on Campbell) (NHL analysts call it "letting him know you're on the ice"). I do not consider Backes to be a cheap shot artist. To my knowledge, this is an isolated incident.
However, the question is: Will we see any supplementary action?
When I saw that the first thing I said was, "No, No, No... I think Backes is going to be the first player to be made an example out of. That was a bad hit on an unexpecting players. Just for the record Backes is one of my favorite players as well and is not known for being a hack like Cooke. Not good!
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