Controversial no-call on Noah Dobson sparks outrage after Canadiens win

Dobson is Montreal's 25-year-old right-shot defender on an eight-year, $76 million deal carrying a $9.5 million AAV, so this was not some depth piece getting tied up on a random shift.

The clip showed Gage Goncalves using his stick on Dobson near the net, taking the Canadiens defender out of the play before Tampa Bay scored its first goal. That is the part that sticks. It was not minor traffic. It wiped out the first layer of coverage.

Anthony Martineau pushed the bigger point right after: the standard is all over the place. That line lands because teams can live with a strict whistle. They cannot read one that changes from shift to shift.

Here is the sequence:

And here is Martineau's reaction:

The missed call was not just frustrating. It directly attacked the Canadiens' defensive structure, because Dobson is one of the blue-liners St-Louis leans on to sort out chaos around the crease.

Montreal still won, and that matters. The Canadiens beat Tampa Bay 4-1 on March 31 and moved to within 2 points of the Lightning for second place in the Atlantic. That raises the temperature on every missed call.

One ignored hook nearly changed the script against a team Montreal is chasing, and that is why this clip traveled so fast.