NHL Officiating (or lack thereof)

[netwolf]

I see a lot of people attribute the NHL's officiating "standard" to the league's desire for parity, but I think that's just a byproduct of it. I think the real reasons for it are mainly two-fold.

First, for as long as I've been aware of the NHL, the powers that be have practically fallen all over themselves with the battle aspect of the sport. They even ran an ill-conceived TV commercial equating playoff hockey players to samurai complete with Sun Tzu quotes for crying out loud:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeYPx3TGXrQ[/youtube]

Compete level is obviously a great thing and I don't want to diminish it's value, but it should never eclipse actually being good at hockey. In the NHL, it most certainly does though. We've all heard this old hockey cliche: hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Sounds good, sounds honorable, right? You don't want players half-assing their way to a win. And you know what, if that was all there was to it, maybe that would be OK, but we know it isn't. How many times have you seen someone get hooked or held, but keep their feet moving and try to fight through it, only to have the ref just watch? The talent is working hard, but it lost anyhow. Is it any wonder why some players take dives, I mean, try to draw calls? That's a whole other topic though.

The second factor here is this is simply how the majority of teams want it to be. Anyone that's followed me for a while knows that while I take issue with how a lot of people in the NHL do their jobs, the lion's share belongs with one group: the NHL Board of Governors. Click that if you'd like to see who's really responsible for the current state of the NHL They are the entity Gary Bettman reports to and they (not Bettman) ultimately dictate what goes on in the NHL. If you are one of those Fire Bettman! people, I'm afraid I've got some bad news. They think he's great and if they didn't, they'd fire him and get someone else in there to do what they want.

Not to get too far off-topic, but remember when Brendan Shanahan first took charge of the Department of Player Safety? He came out guns blazing and hammered guys. Then certain people started complaining, he calmed down, and eventually left the post. That's all the BoG. If enough of them (or certain members) don't like something, it gets changed almost immediately.

Given that, it isn't exactly a stretch to reach the opposite conclusion regarding officiating: if it doesn't change, most of them are fine with it. Why that is, I don't know. It probably differs from club to club. I have no inside knowledge; I'm just a semi-retired, former part-time training camp message board poster (the word blog hadn't really caught on when I started) that's been watching hockey for a long time and has seen stars consistently hampered by lesser players for most of that time.

Others are fine with things as-is because even in 2021 the dinosaur mentality that perpetuates this nonsense is still a LOT more ingrained than any of us are comfortable admitting. Remember when DoPS added Ray Whitney? We all thought that was great. "They're finally getting a skill guy in there." Then he uncorked a gem about taking pride in "putting the onus on skill players to be able to take contact and be prepared for contact, to expect to be hit."

Some BoG members don't push for change because of hockey culture. It frowns on complaining. That would explain why all of Mario Lemieux's criticisms over the years (as both a player and owner) were met with the awesome combo of indifference and ridicule. That's probably why people players don't speak up.

Finally, other teams are fine with the status quo because it's the great equalizer. Not every team is lucky enough to draft a Lemieux, Crosby, McDavid or [insert your favorite generational player here] and on top of that, building a good team is hard. Why make it even harder by enforcing a standard that puts you and even more of a disadvantage?

Dom at the Athletic($) just put this out as I was cobbling the above thoughts together. Go read that if you can. Really nails the ridiculousness of all this nonsense.

[murphydump55]

Great stuff Eric, both you and Dom. It drives me just as nuts.

I coach another sport and have done so for 26 years at all levels from University/college, to club, to highschool, to provincial, to little kids development. My biggest complaint is that the officials below the College level always seem to officiate the game based on the less skilled team. "Your team is better than them so I'm not calling everything on them", "you're going to demolish them if I call everything"

So because my team works harder and becomes a better team, we get penalized? My kids look at me like "why do we get called on that and they don't?" How do you explain that we get punished because we are more skilled and a better team? The job of the official is not to let the lesser skilled team hang around, it's to officiate the game and let the skill take care of the results.

The NHL is no different in how they look for calls to make sure the calls stay even. You definitely can't call more than 3 penalties in a row on a team, and if it's a 5 on 3, you have to let the defending team get away with murder, because we can't call another one on them. That stick foul we called in the first? Well we can't call that in the third, in fact we're going to let a LOT more go in the 3rd.

I would love to sit down with the head of officials and just ask them HOW they condone the job that some of their officials do. It's absolutely asinine. Mind you, Angel Hernandez still has a job, and that's scary.

[relantel]

Caught red-handed with Tim Peel and they just don't care.

[Jim]

Just this past weekend I was watching some "Bad ref/ups" videos on Youtube. Baseball... a lot of bad calls. There is a sport where you you tell the umps to just stop coming to work and the game wouldn't miss a step. With the video/electronic systems ALREAY in place, umps are 100% unnecessary.

[pronovost19]

Last night was another perfect example of how post-whistle scrums and face washing gets taken to the next level. If the NHL really gave a crap about the product, they would have a zero-tolerance edict for post-whistle scrums that initiate any contact with the head area. The NFL has cracked down on headshots and tried to clean up the game - initially, I was against that - but it makes perfect sense to me now. When the NFL loses control - you get Miles Garrett stuff. However, the NHL still affords skilless players the opportunity to even the playing field by targeting certain folks.

Put someone whose career was shortened by goons in charge of the suspension process. Then you might get justice. Having Parros in charge is a fricking joke.

[brwi]

Hall instigates a fight with Mayfield???? He's fortunate to get out of that one relatively unscathed.

[Zarovich]

The reducing of the 5 minutes for spearing to a 2 minute minor for slashing was terrible. I guess when you don’t call anything on the first 2 cross checks, then let each guy whack each other again before the spearing occurs, the refs realized they let too much go.

[Southern Fan]

Cassidy has a point about the Islanders. Lou L. Knows how to build a team to play to the bias of playoff officiating. Holding, interference, roughing calls are ignored. If you are a moderately sized, skilled team or all your offense centers around one line, you better not draw the Isles in the playoffs.

[brwi]

Cassidy has a point about the Islanders. Lou L. Knows how to build a team to play to the bias of playoff officiating. Holding, interference, roughing calls are ignored. If you are a moderately sized, skilled team or all your offense centers around one line, you better not draw the Isles in the playoffs.

Cassidy is about the last HC that should be whining about officiating with the 100s of cross checks to the back, shoulders, head that almost his entire roster gets barely called for, to go along with the usual after the whistle BS.

The Isles manage to control themselves whistle to whistle are are coached by Trotz, which is why they were the lowest penalized team. The B's being the 3rd highest and not #1 indicates the refs let a lot of Bruin stuff go just because they are a "heavy" team and it's the norm they will get away with it more often than a team like the Pens that any cheap crap gets noticed and penalized.