I can’t argue this one, in the sense that he absolutely was in the crease. Everyone has watched the clip, and we’ve seen the photos (see lead image). Hull’s skate is in the blue paint.
The contrarian take is that it didn’t matter. The league got it right, no matter what Sabres fans say.
For those of you too young to remember, the NHL spent most of the 1990s with a ridiculous crease rule everyone hated. It basically stated that any attacking player being in the crease, whether or not they had anything to do with the play, would result in no goal. (And yes, this is essentially the rule some people now want to bring back when they demand a black-and-white crease rule because a goalie interference call went against their team. Those people are wrong and you should ignore them.)
The end result of the terrible crease rule was that for years, right as offense was already plummeting across the league because of clutch-and-grab and the neutral zone trap, the NHL was working diligently to take tons of goals off the board because one guy had his pinky toenail in the other side of the crease, having no impact whatsoever on the play. It was terrible.
And then Brett Hull scored the Cup-winning goal with his entire skate in there, it wasn’t waved off, and everyone freaked out. And you can understand why. We’d spent years seeing plays like that result in no goal, and now the league seemed to be ignoring its own rule. Maybe they didn’t have the guts to overturn a Cup winner. Or maybe they just figured it was their job to mess with the Sabres. Either way, they messed up, and everyone knows it.
But everyone is wrong. The Hull call was the right one.
What people forget, or maybe never knew, is that there was an exception to the blanket crease rule: Players were allowed to go into the crease with possession of the puck, just like they can today. In Hull’s case, he had the puck when his skate went in the crease, and even though the puck had come out, he maintained possession before taking that Cup-winning shot.
The league even maintains they’d sent out a memo to teams in the weeks before the Final, outlining essentially this exact situation. They also claim they did review the play, but that it was such a clear example of a good goal that they didn’t need to delay the celebration before ruling that it should count.
You can blame the league for not communicating the nuance of the rule to the fans until it was too late, since private memos and expedited reviews don’t help your viewers at home. But while the messaging was flawed, the call itself was the right one. It always has been, no matter what the conspiracy crew tries to tell you.
Presenting the Stanley Cup directly to the winning team’s captain is the best trophy presentation in sports. — Jonathan S.
Jonathan is trying to bait me into arguing for the way other pro leagues do it, where they hand the trophy to the decrepit old billionaire who owns the team instead of the players who just earned it. Nobody likes that, and the NHL being the only league to skip the suits and go straight to the players is one of the few things they very obviously get right. I won’t argue with that.
But is there an even better way? Stay with me on this.
Tradition says that the Stanley Cup is handed to the team’s captain, who skates with it for a bit before bestowing the honor of the first handoff to one of his teammates. Then it becomes a bit of a free-for-all, with players passing the Cup around and making sure everyone gets a turn. It’s pretty great.
But is the captain always the right player to get the Cup first? Sometimes, sure, of course. Nobody’s arguing with Steve Yzerman finally getting his Cup in 1997, or Alex Ovechkin in 2018, or Steven Stamkos in 2020. Those were iconic players, the faces of their franchises, and they were the right hands to touch the trophy first.
But then you have the cases of guys like Derian Hatcher instead of Mike Modano, or Dustin Brown instead of Anze Kopitar or Drew Doughty, or even Scott Niedermayer instead of Teemu Selanne. Were those really the right guys to get the Cup first?
Maybe. I’m not sure, because I’m not a fan of those teams. And that’s why I’m proposing a new system, where fans of the winning team are invited to take part in a rapid-fire vote for which player should get to accept the Stanley Cup. You’d have to figure out the technology, and a way to make sure other fan bases couldn’t ruin it, but that shouldn’t be all that difficult in the smartphone era. We certainly have enough time to get in a quick vote while the players are celebrating and Gary Bettman is giving his traditional speech that absolutely nobody listens to.
#buffalosabres #dallasstars #brethull #stanleycup1999 #stanleycup #stanleycupplayoffs #nhl #icehockey #hockey
