Chaos erupts after massive hit involving Josh Anderson shocks Canadiens fans
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Vincent Carbonneau
Apr 9, 2026 (8:25 PM)
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Photo credit: Screenshot
Josh Anderson had Martin St. Louis furious after a late extra minor left the Canadiens staring at another penalty they did not believe they earned.
That was the moment that lit the building up.
After an icing, tempers rose along the wall and Anderson wound up with the extra minor for what was called a cross-check.
Montreal's bench clearly did not buy it. St. Louis was livid, and the reaction online from around the team followed the same path right away.
The frustration is easy to understand from the Canadiens side. The sequence looked messy, chippy, and full of little hacks before the extra call landed on Anderson.
That is why the call hit so hard.
One of the loudest reactions around the play argued that Anderson had already taken 5 slashes from Nikita Kucherov before the officials finally decided to sort it out by handing Montreal the extra punishment.
If that is how the Canadiens saw it too, then the anger makes perfect sense. A player absorbs repeated jabs, the scrum grows, and somehow he is the one marching off again.
That is the kind of moment that can swing a bench.
Here is the full scrum :
This moment involving Josh Anderson just changed everything for Montreal
That is really the issue here. This was not just about 1 penalty. It was about the feeling that the line kept moving on Anderson depending on what happened next.
When a player gets hacked, shoved, and pulled into a scrum, the officials have to read the whole sequence cleanly. Montreal clearly felt that did not happen here.
Anderson also plays the kind of game where this stuff follows him. He is around the crease, around the boards, and around the heat, so calls against him always feel louder.
That does not mean every reaction is right. It does mean the Canadiens are going to push back hard when they think his reputation is doing some of the officiating for him.
The crowd saw it that way. The bench looked like it saw it that way. St. Louis definitely looked like he saw it that way.
And for a team trying to stay sharp in a high-pressure game, being forced right back onto the penalty kill after an icing and a scrum is exactly the kind of detail that can boil everybody over.
That is why this moment spread so fast. It was not only a whistle. It was a whistle Montreal felt made no sense in the full context of the play.
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