The Hockey News's Ken Campbell isn't a happy man today. He's not thrilled with the joint NHL-NHLPA competition committee's decision to allow its current non-visor-wearers to continue placing their eyes in peril, he's not thrilled with the fact that the competition committee has chosen to let fighting be, and he's not happy about a topic I've discussed on the Malik Report--the fact that either referees or the NHL's decision to drop its early-season and plain old regular-season standard of rule enforcement for the sake of "letting 'em play" come playoff time resulting in...

Well, more and more playoff games and playoff series being decided by goals resulting from plays that were deemed illegal when the league mandated its referees to call penalties based upon the rulebook, but are no longer illegal because, save horizontal stick fouls, anything goes these days:

Case in point was Wednesday night in Game 3 of the Boston-Pittsburgh series. Had referees Marc Joannette and Dan O’Rourke called all the violations of the rulebook, there probably wouldn’t have been enough players to play 5-on-5 at some points in the game. Then again, had they called the fragrant fouls early, perhaps the players would not have gone through the game thinking they could get away with pretty much anything.

Instead, the two of them made it very clear that they were going to call next to nothing. Then what happened? Well, Jaromir Jagr clearly hooked Evgeni Malkin in the neutral zone and scooped the puck from him, a play that ultimately resulted in Patrice Bergeron scoring the game-winner in double overtime. Basically, Joannette and O’Rourke set the standard and the players responded to it and the game was decided in large part by a restraining foul that clearly should have been called.