TAMPA, Fla. — Philadelphia Flyers quarterback Tony DeAngelo earned a major penalty and foul on Tuesday night after he hit Tampa Bay Lightning forward Corey Perry below the belt.
DeAngelo stepped in front of the Tampa Bay net of players, led with his stick and speared Perry, who immediately fell flat on his back to the ice.
Lightning teammates then surrounded DeAngelo and pinned him to the ice before his Philadelphia teammates joined in to protect him. He received a five-minute penalty in the 5-2 defeat and could face further discipline from the league on Wednesday.
“I haven’t seen a clip of what happened,” Philadelphia coach John Tortorella said in the postgame media. “The guys in the room said it was obvious what happened.”
Tortorella is DeAngelo’s first season coach last year with the Carolina Hurricanes.
“It’s a line you walk over the edge,” Tortorella said. “I want him to have his own personality, to be competitive. I’ve sat a couple of guys and I think they might have lit up a little bit. But I haven’t seen it again, but I think he might have crossed the line.”
In the Flyers locker room after the game, DeAngelo told reporters he wanted to give Perry a “reading,” but he didn’t want to land where he did.
“He tried to cut my stick off my hand a second ago. He talks the whole game,” DeAngelo said. “I asked him to fight and he doesn’t want to fight. He tells me he’s been asking me to fight for years. I can’t say no. But he didn’t want to give him a shot. [where it landed]. Repetition may look bad.’
DeAngelo, 27, has been disciplined before, and while he can show offensive prowess from the blue line and is a defender on the upper end of the power play, he often finds himself in those situations.
“You have to be careful, that’s easier said than done,” Tortorella said. “But that’s part of Tony, and I think he’s done a really good job of staying in that line and competing this year.”
DeAngelo, who has 10 goals and 34 points this season, signed a contract with Carolina last season, which the New York Rangers opted out of in 2021 following a home loss at Madison Square Garden between the defenseman and then-teammate Alexander Georgiev.
“Obviously we had an incident,” Rangers general manager Jeff Gorton said at the time. “We’ve dealt with it.”
Alex Killorn and Nikita Kucherov each had two goals and an assist as the Lightning snapped a five-game losing streak. Also, Ross Colton scored a goal, Mikhail Sergachev made two assists, Andriy Vasilevsky made 33 saves.
“I liked the response,” Lightning coach John Cooper said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
