Dallas Stars forward Ryan Garbutt will have a hearing on Thursday to answer for a nasty knee-on-knee hit on Oilers’ star Taylor Hall on Tuesday night.

As colour man Drew Remenda noted at the time, Garbutt’s leg was extended a long way out, and watching the replay it seems pretty clear he saw Hall coming.

Also doubtless factoring in here is Garbutt’s history, which includes fines and suspensions. Garbutt was suspended five games by the NHL early last season for this hit on a puckless Dustin Penner: 

That was Garbutt’s first run-in with NHL player safety, but he’d follow it up late last season with a nasty piece of stickwork on everybody’s favourite winger, Anaheim Ducks’ star Corey Perry:  

Garbutt was fined for the NHL for that incident, in addition to taking a five minute major for spearing in the game itself.

The Oilers on the ice responded fairly well to the incident, with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Jordan Eberle both immediately confronting Garbutt. Naturally, that isn’t going to do much to dissuade a player of Garbutt’s caliber from playing the game the way he does; this is a guy who broke into pro hockey in the Central League, racking up 200-plus penalty minutes in his first campaign.

Also worth noting is that this was Luke Gazdic’s first game of the season, and his presence in the lineup was equally ineffective at preventing Garbutt from taking a shot at Hall when he had the chance. This isn’t a surprise either; pests like Garbutt have a job to do and the possibility of a heavyweight on the other team trying to goad them into a fight to even the score isn’t going to change that.

Now it falls to the NHL’s Department of Player Safety to send Garbutt the message that this sort of thing isn’t going to be tolerated. And that should give Garbutt some pause, particularly since the NHL’s Stephane Quintal identified knee-on-knee shots as an area the department was looking to crack down on: 

Garbutt’s an easy target, a low-end NHL player with a recent history of breaking the rules who took a shot at a bona fide star; it’s going to be interesting to see how much of a penalty he gets. 

A suspension is likely, with something in the two game range likely being fair based on what has been handed out for similar plays in the past: 

(And just to forestall the comments reminding me that Garbutt is a repeat offender while Hall wasn’t, injury is also taken into account. Clutterbuck missed six games; Hall didn’t miss even that many shifts.)