{"id":219678,"date":"2026-03-14T15:50:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T15:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/219678\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T15:50:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T15:50:11","slug":"nhl-suspends-ducks-radko-gudas-5-games-for-hit-on-auston-matthews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/219678\/","title":{"rendered":"NHL suspends Ducks\u2019 Radko Gudas 5 games for hit on Auston Matthews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anaheim Ducks captain Radko Gudas has been suspended for five games and fined $104,166.65 by the NHL\u2019s Department of Player Safety on Friday for his knee-to-knee hit<\/a> on Toronto Maple Leafs captain Auston Matthews during the Leafs\u2019 6-4 win on Thursday night.<\/p>\n

It is the fifth suspension for Gudas in his 14-year NHL career and his first since 2019, when he got two games for high-sticking Tampa Bay Lightning star Nikita Kucherov. Gudas\u2019 longest suspension was 10 games, given after he slashed Mathieu Perreault in the neck in 2017. The 35-year-old Gudas will be eligible to return on March 24 for Anaheim\u2019s road game against the Vancouver Canucks.<\/p>\n

The league did not consider Gudas as a \u201crepeat offender\u201d when it came to the amount of his fine, because it had been more than 18 months since Gudas\u2019 last incident. But a player\u2019s overall history can be taken into consideration when determining supplemental discipline<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At 15:47 of the second period on Thursday, and with the Ducks holding a 3-2 lead, Gudas stretched his bent left leg out and caught Matthews\u2019 left knee after Matthews took a pass in the slot area within the Anaheim zone and readied for a scoring chance.<\/p>\n

Matthews went down in pain, left the ice without putting weight on his leg and did not return to the game. Gudas was given a five-minute major penalty and a game misconduct penalty, and Toronto scored twice on the resulting power play to take the lead on the way to snapping an eight-game winless streak.<\/p>\n

Ducks coach Joel Quenneville said he felt there was no premeditation by Gudas on the play, but Toronto coach Craig Berube and Leafs center John Tavares called it a dirty hit. The Leafs initially didn\u2019t respond on the ice but got physical with Anaheim in the third period, including a fight by rookie Easton Cowan against Ducks defenseman Jackson LaCombe.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a little back-and-forth game like that,\u201d LaCombe said. \u201cA little chippy. I guess I just hit one of their guys and he stepped in for his teammate. It was expected. Just one of those that\u2019s part of the game. I was expecting it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Ducks could have newly acquired John Carlson ready to step in and fill Gudas\u2019 absence. Carlson, whom Anaheim got from the Washington Capitals at last week\u2019s trade deadline, has been skating with the team the last several days as he recovers from a lower-body injury that\u2019s kept him out of action since Feb. 6. Anaheim could have an all-veteran right side of its blue line when Gudas returns to go with Carlson and Jacob Trouba, complementing its young puck movers on the left.<\/p>\n

Gudas has two goals, 11 assists, 45 penalty minutes and a minus-1 rating for Anaheim, which holds a slim lead in the Pacific Division as it attempts to make the playoffs for the first time since 2018.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anaheim Ducks captain Radko Gudas has been suspended for five games and fined $104,166.65 by the NHL\u2019s Department…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":219679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,824,165,164,404,2992],"class_list":["post-219678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-ducks","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-nhl","tag-toronto-maple-leafs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}