Well, Radko Gudas has gotten five games for his vicious knee on Toronto Maple Leafs captain Auston Matthews. Gudas intentionally stuck his knee out to clip Matthews in the offensive zone, and was assessed a match penalty as a result.

On Friday, the Leafs announced that Matthews would miss the remainder of the season after suffering a Grade 3 MCL tear and quad contusion as a result of the collision with Gudas. Shortly after, the NHL’s Department of Player Safety handed out a five-game suspension to Gudas.

There’s not much of a Canucks spin on this. Other than the fact the response from the Leafs players has convinced me that their team needs to be blown up even more than the Canucks have been (and will continue to be). You see your captain down on the ice in agony and nobody even so much as looks at Gudas? That’s a pretty good metaphor for why that “team” has failed to accomplish anything for the last decade. It’s sad.

Leafs head coach Craig Berube didn’t mince words post game about it, either. What I like most is that Berube seemed to care less about the discipline that the league would be handing down to Gudas than the lack of response from his group. As he should.

“A dirty play,” Berube said of the hit post game. “The league will obviously look at and see what the suspension will be or whatever. We should’ve had four guys in there doing something about it, but it didn’t happen. But I thought they responded in the third. It was a good response there, but we all would’ve liked everybody to get in there right away.”

Couldn’t agree more. It’s moments like that where I appreciate what a guy like Elias Pettersson (the defenceman) has brought to the table since he turned pro. He’s big and physical, and is never afraid to go over and stick up for his teammates or get into a scrum. You absolutely need guys like that. The Canucks need more of that.

And the excuse from Leafs players that they “didn’t see it?”

You did see your captain down on the ice. You did see one of the dirtiest players in the league standing there, a linesman already over to him in anticipation of what should have happened. You shoot first, and ask questions later. My colleague Jay Rosehill (who has 117 NHL games and 352 career penalty minutes more than I do) put it best in a three-minute rant. Here’s part of it:

“In order to have success, you need to have a team-first mentality… it needs to be the foundation of your team. This team watches that, your captain writhing on the ground in pain, and nobody on the ice knows enough, cares enough, has enough heart, has enough pride to do [expletive] anything about it… They don’t have the leadership to create the culture to build what it takes to win in that league. They’re not willing to do the hard stuff.”

Remember when Jannik Hansen charged in after Nazem Kadri when he saw teammate Daniel Sedin down on the ice? The hit from Kadri on Sedin wasn’t as dirty as it initially appeared, but do you think Hansen regrets jumping in and taking a penalty for sticking up for his friend and teammate? I doubt it. And that sequence was right after Hansen himself got blown up in the neutral zone. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch it below (trigger warning: the video below will remind you of the Luca Sbisa-Nikita Tryamkin defence pairing):

Stick up for your teammates.