Toronto Maple Leafs forward Nick Foligno (71) fights Montreal Canadiens forward Corey Perry (94) during the first period of game one of the first round of the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Scotiabank Arena.John E. Sokolowski/USA TODAY Sports via Reuters
No player from Toronto or Montreal would have seen the hit happen in real time. All they would have seen was the aftermath.
After falling awkwardly to the ice and taking an inadvertent, full-speed knee to the chin, John Tavares was knocked out.
Aesthetically, there are different sorts of knockouts. Sometimes the injured party is just out. Sometimes his senses return quickly. This was one of the gruesome ones where the injured man is conscious, but distressed and not in control of himself.
When the first Leafs medic on the scene lifted Tavares back up to a kneeling position, the captain sagged sickeningly backward until his torso was bent parallel to his legs.
That’s the point at which Maple Leafs GM Kyle Dubas bolted from the team’s suite in the rafters and began running through the stands down to ice level.
While viewers at home were watching the slo-mo replay from multiple angles – Tavares tossed to the ice, body twisting, head popping up to knee height, Montreal’s Corey Perry moving at a full head of steam with nowhere else to go – the players were watching Tavares being strapped to a gurney.
As the cameras settled on several faces, the most ashen was Perry’s. Everyone knows his reputation for score-settling, as well as score-starting. But it would take a real cynic to have seen him in that moment and believe he’d intended for this to happen.
That said, nobody knew anything for sure. So what happened next was the best possible outcome after a bad mishap.
After Tavares had been taken away, flashing a thumb as he did so, Perry had an animated conversation with his tit-for-tat Toronto counterpart, Nick Foligno. Another greybeard, Montreal’s Shea Weber, attempted to arbitrate, but eventually gave up.
Perry and Foligno lined up across from each other at the subsequent faceoff. The jawing continued. Perry loosened his gloves so that they could be dropped to the ice rather than shaken off. And the fight started.
Perry’s only goal was getting a handful of Foligno’s jersey so that he could hold him off. Foligno threw 14 punches, none of which landed squarely. Perry threw none. The Canadien just stood there letting his pads absorb the blows.
Once it ended, the players banged their sticks, the tension thinned and the game went on.
The code gets a lot of bad press. After the game ended, Foligno scoffed when the word was brought up: “I don’t see any code.”
But the code is real. It exists for a purpose. This was an instance of the code performing its function.
The real credit here should go to Foligno. As the fight started, he took an almighty raking on social media. What was the point? Hadn’t he seen that Tavares’s injury was an accident? What was a fight going to prove?
Of course, he hadn’t seen the injury. They don’t play with their phones in their pockets. The point was preventing two-and-a-half more periods of fights and worse.
What did the fight prove? That the Leafs will not allow someone to grievously injure their symbolic No. 1 and walk away saying, “Sorry. My bad.”
Asked repeatedly about it later, Foligno was bemused at first: “Our captain’s on the ice. It’s nothing more than that. And Perry obliged … I think it just addresses the situation and everyone moves on from it.”
By the end, he was actively irritated: “You stand up for one another whether it’s right or wrong.”
This is an important distinction in the code that doesn’t translate into real life. In real life, intent is paramount. In hockey, they are a little more Old Testament about this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter if you meant for something to happen. You’re still responsible for it happening.
The end result of Thursday night’s accident is that the Leafs lost a cornerstone of their lineup 10 minutes into what they hope is two months of playoffs. Their Stanley Cup odds just took a nosedive.
In that context, what Foligno did was an act of charity. No one wants to see the Leafs chasing Perry around for five or six games trying to cross-check him in the back of the head every chance they get, least of all Perry.
Foligno let Perry off the hook. A game that could have turned into a bloodbath remained on the rails. When Toronto’s Wayne Simmonds invited Perry to discuss their differences without using words later in the contest, Perry was able to refuse him with dignity. This is how it should be.
Even Perry got that.
“Nick came up and said, ‘Let’s just settle this now and not wait,’” Perry said later. “Yeah. You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Okay, these guys aren’t Shakespeare, but you have to admire the sangfroid.
As with Foligno, questioners kept circling back on Perry, trying to elicit some sort of emotional epiphany. This would be the wrong guy for that sort of thing.
“It’s an accident,” Perry shrugged. “I know it’s an accident, but it’s their captain. It is what it is.”
It’s not clear where this goes next. The Leafs announced on Friday morning that Tavares is “resting at home” and out “indefinitely.”
As this series goes on, there will be multiple opportunities for someone on either side to say or do something provocative that kicks things off again.
But on Thursday night at least, the code did something the officials can’t – it took a combustible situation the rules aren’t designed to deal with and prevented it from exploding.