After NFL officials called James Bradberry for holding and effectively secured Super Bowl LVII for the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday, it begs the question: how would NHL players feel if referees made a similar debatable call in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final?
Well, Buffalo Sabres captain Kyle Okposo put himself in that scenario and gave his thoughts on Monday.
“I think that if you’re trying to compare, as close to apples to apples as you can, you’re thinking, OK, Game 7 Stanley Cup Final, last minute, and a bit of a ticky-tack hold — one that you might call in the regular season and you might not — they’re not calling that a penalty. Nor would we want them to. It’s just a matter of fact,” Okposo told Lance Lysowski of The Buffalo News.
“Everybody can complain as much as they want (about) how penalties don’t get called in the playoffs, but they call enough. I don’t think any player in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final would want that call.”
Bradberry’s penalty came from a slight tug of Juju Smith-Schuster’s jersey on a Chiefs’ 3rd-and-8 with 1:54 remaining in the game and ended with Patrick Mahomes throwing an incomplete pass.
“It was a holding. I tugged his jersey,” Bradberry said after the game. “I was hoping they would let it slide.”
Most fans, however, strongly disagreed with the call that brought a thrilling Super Bowl to an anti-climactic end. Former NFL tight end Greg Olsen, the analyst on Fox, also disagreed during the broadcast.
Referee Carl Cheffers said it was a “clear case of a jersey grab.”
“The receiver went to the inside and he was attempting to release to the outside,” Cheffers told a pool reporter. “The defender grabbed the jersey with his right hand and restricted him from releasing to the outside. So, therefore, we called defensive holding.”