Alexandre Texier was first handed a five-minute penalty on Saturday night after taking a swing at K'Andre Miller, then had it cut down to two minutes for a “stick check.” The reduction quickly turned a routine penalty into another flashpoint in the long-running talk around whether the NHL leans toward the Canadiens.
The reaction was immediate. The Hurricanes felt Texier got off pretty lightly, and the change in the call only deepened the suspicion among some observers that the outcome might have been different if the roles had been reversed. On May 25, 2026, Renaud Lavoie said during his segment on BPM Sports that people had spoken to him about the incident and wondered whether the decision to go from five minutes to two had come from the NHL itself. He said that was not what he thinks, only what he had heard.
The backdrop matters because the conversation about league favoritism never really goes away. A final featuring the Canadiens would be more profitable for the NHL than a final featuring the Hurricanes, because the league receives all revenue from ticket sales in the final. That alone keeps the speculation alive, especially when a Canadiens-Golden Knights matchup can be sold as a showdown between Martin St. Louis and his former coach, John Tortorella. The question hanging over the debate is not whether one call settled anything, but why another officiating controversy keeps feeding the same old suspicion.
That is what makes this latest argument hard to dismiss and just as hard to prove. Inconsistent officiating still seems easier to believe than a grand conspiracy in favor of the Habs, yet people are still wondering about that theory after another call that left one side feeling the standard was not the same for everyone. The earlier question involving Taylor Hall and Lane Hutson only adds to the sense that this is becoming a pattern people are already looking for, whether the league wants that conversation or not.
For Texier, the sequence is simple enough: a bad penalty on Saturday night, an initial five-minute assessment, and then a reduction to two minutes for a “stick check.” For everyone else, it is another night when one call carried far beyond the rink and straight into the league’s credibility problem.
