Martin St. Louis goes off on referees after tough loss to New York Rangers

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Graham Montgomery
November 30, 2024 (9:16 PM)

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Montreal Canadiens head coach Martin St. Louis called out the referees this afternoon after his team lost 4-3 to the New York Rangers.

The Habs dropped the game after giving up a goal in the dying seconds of the 3rd period. St. Louis was clearly bitter about how things played out in his post-game presser.

The veteran coach complimented his team on their performance but refused to answer questions properly after the game. He simply kept repeating the same response.

"I loved our game but I'm not going to talk about the refs."

The coach answered questions in both French and English, as is tradition for the Quebec-based team, but regardless of what language he was speaking, he continued to give the same response.

After six questions and just over a minute into the press conference, it became clear that St. Louis had no desire to say anything else about the game, and as such, it was called early.

The sour spot came during the play where the Rangers scored the game-winning goal with just under 30 seconds left in the game.

The Rangers were on the powerplay when Habs forward Joel Armia clearly appeared to be tripped up along the boards as he was battling to clear the puck out of the zone, but there was no call and Kappo Kakko scored just seconds later.

After the game, Armia himself said that he felt that he was tripped, but also took responsibility for the loss, saying that the team's penalty kill simply was not good enough.

The fan response was unanimous as well. It is clear to just about everyone other than the on-ice officials that there was a trip on this play, but there's nothing the Canadiens can do about it now.

Hopefully, this will have repercussions for the NHL later on. We clearly need more accountability for the referees and fans are growing increasingly annoyed about it.

Will that actually happen though? We'll just have to wait and see, but we probably should not get our hopes up.