Emotions were running high late in the second period of Friday's Islanders-Panthers game during a scrum around the crease of Florida goalie Roberto Luongo. It all started with Panthers defenseman Dmitry Kulikov and Aaron Ekblad getting into it with Islanders forwards Matt Martin and Casey Cizikas and kicking off a scrum that would result in seven penalties.
Two of those penalties went to Cizikas, and he is probably lucky he didn't get kicked out of the game.
As a linesman was trying to separate him and Ekblad, he appeared to give the Panthers defenseman a quick punch to ... well ... a rather sensitive area.
You can see it happen around the 10-second mark of the video below.
Here it is from another angle.
Cizikas with a strategic punch below the belt pic.twitter.com/ae6Ok43FNm
— Stephanie (@myregularface) April 16, 2016
(GIF via @MyRegularFace)
Cizikas ended up getting two roughing minors out of that, while his teammates Martin and Cal Clutterbuck also received two-minute roughing minors. Florida's Derek MacKenzie, Shawn Thornton and Garrett Wilson picked up roughing minors of their own.
That should probably warrant some additional discipline from the league, but since it's the playoffs and the NHL really doesn't want to suspend players in the postseason this will probably be the end of it.
