Auston Matthews didn’t know the rule. By the letter of it, that didn’t matter.

The timing could not have been worse. Easton Cowan had scored at 6:06 of the third period to pull the Maple Leafs within one, 3-2 in Calgary on Monday. Fifty-eight seconds later, the Flames took a holding minor, giving the Leafs a power play in a one-goal game.

One second into it, Matthews lost his footing on the draw and went down. The puck hit his glove. Liney Trent Knorr immediately signaled the penalty, relaying it to referee Frederick L’Ecuyer: two minutes, delay of game – faceoff violation. The power play was gone, with the teams moving to 4-on-4.

 

 

“You Really Gotta Be Sure”

Matthews, to his credit, argued the spirit rather than the rule – and admitted he wasn’t even sure about the rule:

“I think you got to be sure 100%,” said Matthews. “I don’t even know what exactly the rule is, if you have to cover it or whatever, but I got a lot of respect for refs … They’re not perfect but, in that situation, I feel like you really gotta be sure.”

The honest answer to his question: no, you don’t have to cover it. Contact is enough.

His coach took the explanation he was given. Leafs head coach Jim Hiller relayed the referee’s reasoning:

“He said it hit his glove, and that’s the rule if it’s down and he uses his glove,” Hiller relayed. “So I’m not going to argue with him. He made the call. He saw it closer than I did.”

The Rule

Rule 67.2 assesses a minor penalty for “delay of game – face-off violation” to a player taking the faceoff “who attempts to win the face-off by batting the puck with their hand.” Read alone, that sounds like it requires intent.

The note underneath it says otherwise: the two centers “are not permitted to play the puck with their hand without incurring a penalty under this rule until such time as a third player (from either team) has at least touched the puck.”

The NHL added the faceoff hand penalty for the 2012-13 season, approved by the Board of Governors on June 19, 2012, and first enforced when the lockout-delayed season opened that January. It originally lived in Rule 76.4 before being consolidated into Rule 67.2.

It was built to close a loophole. Under the hand-pass rule (Rule 79), a hand pass in your own defensive zone was perfectly legal, allowing   a center tied up on a defensive-zone draw to swat the puck back to a teammate with his glove, a real advantage the attacking center couldn’t match. Before the change, the worst a gloved draw could draw elsewhere was a whistle. The 2012 updates – which also added the penalty for covering the puck with a glove – made it two minutes everywhere.

The intent argument is as old as the rule itself. The first faceoff violation call went to Brandon Sutter on opening weekend in January 2013. Three weeks later, Nashville’s Paul Gaustad was called in overtime in Minnesota on a puck that appeared to bounce off his glove with both hands on his stick – with no intent at all – and the Wild won the game on the ensuing power play. And the Leafs have literally been here before: in January 2013, Mikhail Grabovski fell on a draw against the Rangers and covered the puck with his hand. Same fall, same call, same jersey.

It’s come up in the playoffs, too. In 2022, Anthony Cirelli won a draw with his hand for Tampa Bay and the goal that followed was wiped out on a coach’s challenge for a missed stoppage, since a penalty can’t be assessed off a video review. In 2024, Vegas’s Chandler Stephenson was penalized under 67.2 in a postseason game against Dallas.

Uncommon Calls

Just how rare is this? Pretty rare… though violation calls appear to be up this season. Checking NHL play-by-play over the last three seasons finds the faceoff-violation minor was assessed nine times in 2023-24, six times in 2024-25, and five times in 2025-26, including a call to Tomas Hertl from last spring’s Stanley Cup Final.

Matthews is already the third this season, following Minnesota’s Danila Yurov on October 12 and Vancouver’s Drew O’Connor on October 20.

As uncommon as it might be, this is not the first time Auston Matthews has been whistled for a hand pass on a draw. You have to go way back to his rookie season for the last one. Matthews was called for the same violation on January 7, 2017, against Montreal. Two faceoff-violation minors, nearly a decade apart… and it’s apparent that the first call didn’t exactly leave the Leafs’ captain with a lasting impression of the rule.

The Verdict

By the rulebook’s note, L’Ecuyer and Hiff got it right: the puck hit the glove of a center, before anyone else touched it, during a faceoff. That’s the penalty, full stop.

By the rulebook’s own headline wording – “attempts to win” – Matthews has a genuine grievance: a player flat on the ice after losing an edge isn’t attempting anything. The league wrote both sentences in 2012 and has spent thirteen years calling the second one. Monday night in Calgary was just the most famous player yet to find out which sentence governs.

The Calgary Flames went on to defeat the Toronto Maple Leafs 5-2. Referees for the game were Frederick L’Ecuyer (#17) and Stephen Hiff (#46); linespersons were CJ Murray (#68) and Trent Knorr (#74).