Let's Talk about Trevor Zegras, Rule 48, and Casey Cizikas's Hit to Lian Bichsel's Head

It earned a match penalty in the game, while Zegras earned a hearing from the DoPS

There’s been a bit more talk about hits to the head since Casey Cizikas was assessed a Match penalty for his hit to Lian Bichsel’s head last night. The main reason for the additional chatter is due to Trevor Zegras joining Casey Cizikas on the naughty list.

Zegras wasn’t penalized for his hit in the Ducks’ game against Detroit last night, but he has earned a hearing with the Department of Player Safety today, meaning some supplementary discipline is very likely.

If you didn’t see that hit, then here it is. It’s more of the blindside variety, where Michael Rasmussen has gotten rid of the puck, only for Zegras to come across and pop him in the side of the face with his shoulder. Rasmussen is out for an unknown period of time right now.

That’s a hit the NHL has forbidden since the introduction of Rule 48, which we’ll discuss later on. Here’s a video the NHL made to clearly point out the problem with such hits:

The main phrase to take from this video is from the 1:31 mark: “The player delivering the hit has to avoid making contact with the head on this play.”

If you’re someone who suspects the NHL is somehow sending secret messages to referees to tell them to change calls or find ways to review them, this game was evidence to the contrary. No penalty at all was called on Zegras, and one suspects DoPS will factor in the lack of any time served when they hand down their judgment today.

---

Cizikas, on the other hand, was penalized for his hit on Bichsel, which you can watch here. In fact, he wasn’t just penalized, but assessed a Match penalty, which is a pretty big deal.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the NHL rulebook:

21.1 Match Penalty - A match penalty involves the suspension of a player for the balance of the game and the offender shall be ordered to the dressing room immediately. A match penalty shall be imposed on any player who deliberately attempts to injure or who deliberately injures an opponent in any manner.

For all match penalties, a total of fifteen minutes shall be charged in the records against the offending player (five minutes on the penalty clock, plus an additional 10 minutes for being removed from the game).

21.2 In addition to the match penalty, the player shall be automatically suspended from further competition until the Commissioner has ruled on the issue.

So if you’re wondering why the Department of Player Safety isn’t meeting with Cizikas today, it’s because Gary Bettman has to rule when and whether Cizikas will be allowed to return to play. Match penalties are a very big deal.

As for the call itself, referee Frederick L’Ecuyer’s hand doesn’t go up immediately on the play, but after a couple of seconds, he whistles play down and puts both hands up, presumably after seeing Bichsel in distress after contact with his head.

I’m not certain from the broadcast whether Cody Beach, the other referee who was out of the zone, had called a penalty right away or not. But after the fight was over, L’Ecuyer was the one to announce, “A major penalty has been called on the play. We’re gonna review it.”

After the two referees reviewed the video (during which they cannot consult with anyone else other than to ask for specific video angles or clips), L’Ecuyer announced that Cizikas had been assessed a Match penalty for an illegal check to the head.

Here’s the entirety of Rule 48:

That’s a lot to get through, but one thing you should notice here: officials cannot assess a Major penalty for a check to the head. You can only assess a Minor or a Match penalty.

In other words, this rule dictates that after a hit to the head, the referee makes one of two judgments: either you checked the player’s head out of carelessness, in which case you get a minor penalty; or else you hit the head on purpose, in which case you get the book thrown at you, as Cizikas did.

On the 32 Thoughts podcast this morning, Elliotte Friedman said a couple of teams had reached out to him to mention the process with the call. Which is to say, a major was apparently called, then a match was assessed after. Those are two different calls.

I’m guessing that L’Ecuyer just misspoke initially when he announced a Major, knowing he would give a longer explanation after the review, so he didn’t put too much thought into the initial announcement other than to make sure he called something that allowed for a review.

One former NHL referee I talked to today said the same thing about L’Ecuyer misspeaking, adding that L’Ecuyer could have come out of the review with a Major for elbowing, too. But in the end, the two referees determined it was an illegal check to the head with intent to hit the head (i.e. “injure”), and that pretty much decided things.

Rule 48 is all the result of a sweeping change at the beginning of last decade. You can read much more about it in a piece I highly recommend here, in Greg Wyshynski’s great look from 2021 at how the league has changed as a result of Rule 48. Here’s one excerpt I found really interesting from that piece:

The last decade saw players, coaches and team executives struggle to understand Rule 48 and its application, especially in early hearings. One person with knowledge of the hearings characterized the typical counterarguments from players and teams as "victim blaming," as they spoke more about the opponent taking the hit than the hit itself.

"The first couple of years were very difficult," Shanahan said. "Players and managers would come into the hearings and say, 'This is a legal hit.' You have to acknowledge that six months ago, it was. But it's not anymore. That was a huge shift."

That attitude is a big part of hockey, even today. The onus is on players to “protect” themselves from bad hits to begin with, and there’s a lot of practical wisdom in that. You don’t know what the other guy is going to do, so don’t put yourself in too vulnerable of a position if you can help it. Bichsel will be more aware of players like Cizikas in the future—you may recall Seguin mentioning that he is very aware any time Jacob Trouba is on the ice—and he’ll adapt accordingly. I have little doubt of that.

The thing to be careful of, though, is how the offenders sometimes get the benefit of the doubt when they’re clearly the ones who need to change their behavior more urgently. Violent harm is worse than naivete, and should be punished accordingly. To treat plays like this as nothing more than a “learning experience” for younger players while giving offenders a mere two minutes is not how you reduce brain injuries; that’s how you institutionalize them.

Now, the debate around the Cizikas hit is pretty clearly around whether he actually did intend to hit Bichsel’s head or not, as Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas discussed this morning. And as with all things involving intent, only Cizikas really knows for sure. But given that Cizikas (as we discussed last night) is pretty clearly looking at Bichsel the whole way, it’s obvious that the head contact was avoidable, but that he made it anyway.

Thus, you have to proceed through points i, ii, and iii of Rule 48, which I’ll do with comments after each one:

• (i) Whether the player attempted to hit squarely through the opponent’s body and the head was not "picked" as a result of poor timing, poor angle of approach, or unnecessary extension of the body upward or outward.

  Even with Bichsel squatting a bit as he tries to play the puck, the head was not remotely avoided as Cizikas continues leaning right into Bichsel, driving his shoulder through the side of Bichsel’s head. This was a poor angle of approach and possible some upward extension as well.

• (ii) Whether the opponent put himself in a vulnerable position by assuming a posture that made head contact on an otherwise full body check unavoidable.

  Bichsel is making a clear hockey play here. He isn’t bending over or anything to make what would have been a clean check a head hit.

• (iii) Whether the opponent materially changed the position of his body or head immediately prior to or simultaneously with the hit in a way that significantly contributed to the head contact.

  Bichsel glides right into the play in a stable position the whole way, not changing his stance or head positioning in such a way to catch Cizikas off-guard.

Friedman expressed doubt this morning about whether Cizikas attempted to injure Bichsel (“There’s no way he was trying to attempt to injure or deliberately injure him”). Friedman maintained that such hits become more common in the playoffs—remember Matt Dumba on Joe Pavelski?—and that if Match penalties are doled out this way, that is going to have a deleterious effect on games, come April. (“If that becomes precedent, teams are gonna finish playoff games with 11 players.”)

But I have to disagree a bit with his concern there. The Dumba hit on Pavelski is a great example, I think, of how referees are not looking to call hits to the head when they aren’t clearly meeting the criteria. Dumba wasn’t assessed a penalty for the hit, and I believe point (i) above was properly applied in negating the penalty to Dumba. Like it or not, I think that’s the right application of that rule. It was a vicious hit by Dumba, but just barely within the rules.

I think the rules were followed properly with this call, too. I know it’s anathema to ever say one player is “trying" to injure another in the NHL—how many times do we hear “you never wanna see a guy get hurt” from an offending player—but man, doesn’t this kind of feel like the exact scenario where it would be reasonable to draw that conclusion? Bichsel had drawn the ire of New York for much of the game, and you know the Isles had watched video of Bichsel’s hit(s) in New Jersey, like the one on Dawson Mercer.

Cizikas is a player well-known for laying hits and sending messages, and so forth. So when he had his chance to lay one on the big fella, he didn’t hold back.

Cizikas makes no attempt to play the puck here, instead executing a reversal hit where his shoulder hits Bichsel square in the side of the head. Cizikas could see Bichsel coming, and he chose to lean in and hit the big defenseman right where he did, and the head was the principal point of contact. (again, watch the video.) To say that Cizikas wasn’t trying take some of the wind out of Bichsel’s sails here beggars belief, quite frankly.

This also isn’t Cizikas’s first instance of laying a bad hit. He boarded Brendan Smith a couple of years ago with a nasty hit that also drew a one-game suspension for Cizikas:

Cizikas is also one of the top-25 hitters in the NHL. He delivers tons of hits, so you can’t say he’s inexperienced in terms of how to do so.

The best construction I can put on the hit last night is that Cizikas wanted to lay out Bichsel, and that he simply didn’t work to avoid the head while delivering the hit. But it is his responsibility to avoid the head on a hit like this one, and he didn’t do that. And when you go through the three criteria in Rule 48, it’s pretty clear how the referees arrived at a Match penalty here.

I’m sure Isles fans didn’t like the call, just as Stars fans didn’t like the no-call on Dumba a couple of years ago. But in both cases, the officials reviewed the play, and properly applied the criteria set forth in Rule 48. You can disagree with the rule, but I don’t think you can disagree with the call. Cizikas was looking for a big hit, and he delivered one. Even if he didn’t mean to hit Bichsel’s head, he’s the one who had the option and ability to avoid doing so, and he didn’t. It’s really that simple.

If I drive my car into someone else’s car because I failed to swerve out of oncoming traffic, that’s just as damaging as if I did so intentionally. You might even want to add further legal repercussions if it came to light that I’d written a manifesto entitled “It Is Good to Drive on the Wrong Side and I Am Going to Do That Today,” or if it was revealed that the car I’d hit just so happened to be driven by someone I had a personal grudge against.

Whether Bettman will assess an additional suspension to Cizikas will be very interesting to see. If Friedman is echoing the sentiments around most of the league, then I’d wager we won’t see further discipline. But if the NHL really wants to get headshots out of the game as much as possible, then calls like the Match penalty last night aren’t part of the problem, but the solution.