After video review, 19 seconds of Saturday night’s Penguins vs. Kings game never existed. 

With the Penguins on the power play late in the first period, Egor Chinakhov took a feed from Ville Koivunen and wristed a shot from above the left circle. The puck hit the post and caught the back bar inside the net – in and out so fast that nobody in stripes saw it go in. No goal light, no signal. Play on.

The Penguins’ bench celebrated as play continued. 

Former NHL referee and ESPN rules analyst Dave Jackson summed up what happened next better than anyone:

“Crazy play in LAK last night. PP goal scored by PITT went unnoticed. LAK take a penalty several secs later. Goal is confirmed, clock gets reset, penalty in box gets eliminated and new H. Stick penalty gets assessed. Refs got it correct.”

Every part of that is a rule doing something. Let’s walk through it.

19 Seconds of Hockey That Got Rewound

The timeline, reconstructed from the official record:

  • 17:38, 1st period: Los Angeles defenseman Drew Doughty goes off for interference. Pittsburgh power play.
  • 19:31, 1st period: Chinakhov scores, except nobody calls it. Play continues.
  • The next 19 seconds: the Kings, still killing what everyone believes is a live penalty, take another one as Artemi Panarin high-sticks Connor Dewar.
  • 19:50, 1st period: play stops as the Kings touch the puck. The in-arena horn sounds, indicating a goal. The NHL Situation Room confirms the puck completely crossed the goal line at 19:31.

The referee’s announcement was short and sweet: the puck completely crossed the goal line. We have a goal.

Rule 37.6: The Horn, the Goal, and the Reset

This is Rule 37.6 at work:

“Should the NHL Situation Room be able to determine that a goal has been scored through the use of video replay, and play on the ice has nonetheless continued, the NHL Situation Room shall instruct that the in-arena horn be sounded to stop play immediately, and the goal will be awarded. The game clock (and penalty clocks, if applicable) will then be re-set to the time of the goal.”

So the goal counts – Chinakhov from Koivunen and Evgeni Malkin at 19:31, a power-play goal, 3-1 Pittsburgh. And the game clock goes back to show 0:29 remaining in the first period. The final 29 seconds get played over again.

But not everything was wiped clean…

One Penalty Disappears, One Penalty Stands

Here’s where it gets genuinely weird, because the reset rewinds time for some things and not others.

Doughty’s penalty vanishes. A power-play goal terminates the minor penalty being served (Rule 16.2 – the minor with the least amount of time left on it comes off the board). Since Chinakhov’s goal is deemed scored at 19:31, Doughty’s interference minor ended at 19:31 too. He’d nearly served the whole thing. The goal emptied the box retroactively, springing Doughty free as of the time of the goal. 

Panarin’s penalty stands. The high-stick on Dewar happened during those extra 19 seconds, but penalties don’t get rewound. The infraction was real, it was called, and it’s enforced. Panarin’s minor went on the board at the reset time of 19:31, sending Pittsburgh right back to the power play for the replayed end of the first period and the first 1:31 of the second.

From Rule 37.2:

Any penalties signaled during the period of time between the apparent goal and the next stoppage of play shall be assessed in the normal manner, except when a minor penalty is to be assessed to the team scored upon, and is therefore nullified by the scoring of the goal.

In this case, the team scored upon already had a guy in the box. Doughty comes out and Panarin goes in to serve his full sentence.

That’s the dividing line of a Rule 37.6 reset: the clock, the score, and the penalty clocks all go back to the moment of the goal. Anything that would have scored during the extra play would be wiped out entirely, aside from penalties taken. Both teams effectively played 19 seconds of bonus hockey that counted for nothing except a minor penalty on Panarin. 

It’s rare, but it’s not new. We’ve seen the Situation Room award a goal the officials missed on the ice before. What made Saturday’s sequence special was everything stacked on top of it: a penalty killed by a goal nobody saw, and a second penalty that outlived the rewind.

Remarkably, the Situation Room wasn’t done with this game. In the second period, a Kings goal that would have tied the game 3-3 was overturned on a successful Penguins coach’s challenge for offside. Two reviews, two goals decided from Toronto – one awarded, one erased.

Tommy Novak scored twice for the Penguins, Sidney Crosby added two goals of his own, and Malkin’s three assists moved him past Adam Oates into 20th place on the NHL’s all-time scoring list with 1,421 points. Sergei Murashov made 26 saves for his first win of the season.

The Pittsburgh Penguins defeated the Los Angeles Kings 5-2, with referees Trevor Hanson (#14) and Riley Brace (#49) and linespersons Joe Mahon (#89) and Bevan Mills (#53) working the game.