The puck is 30 feet in th air when crossing the blue line.

I would love to know what secret technology the NHL is using to determine where that puck was when Oshie crossed the line.  I watched that replay 10 times from every angle they provided, and once it is more than 4 ft up, there is absolutely no way to discern it from the tarp and seats in the background.

Posted by TreKronor on 03/04/21 at 10:46 AM ET

Time to bring back the glowing puck!

Posted by damndog revenge From the bowels of Detroit on 03/04/21 at 10:49 AM ET

At 2:23 of the video, you can see the puck travel through the blue sign in the background, well behind the player crossing the blue line.  It’s still not 100% whether the puck would be in the zone ahead of the player (the puck’s moving faster than the player is skating), but short of doing motion tracking, parabola estimation (as I’ve done with high speed videos before), I’d have made the same call as the war room and denied the goal for being off-side.

Posted by The Meal from Firestone, CO on 03/04/21 at 11:57 AM ET

Posted by The Meal from Firestone, CO on 03/04/21 at 11:59 AM ET

At 2:23 of the video, you can see the puck travel through the blue sign in the background, well behind the player crossing the blue line.

I would never call that clear and concise, nor am I convinced that what we see in that image is even a puck.  Or anything at all. 

Guess it doesn’t matter so much, Caps won the game anyways, though it could matter in the end since it was a SO win.

Posted by TreKronor on 03/04/21 at 12:07 PM ET

Time to bring back the glowing puck!

Bag dog. Bad!

Posted by Royal Grand Exalted PooBah from the basement of the Alamo on 03/04/21 at 01:29 PM ET

Sorry I couldn’t get back to you TK.  If you watch the rafters of that video in the frames that follow, you can see as the puck flips around how far it trails the player as they enter the zone.  You’re right that the frames that have the puck in the blue sign aren’t conclusive, but the video as a whole, as viewed on a large monitor, seems pretty conclusive to me.

There’s no chance the refs, using a mobile device in the arena, had any chance of making an appropriate determination from the ice level.  The overturn had to come from folks in the war room, going through the video frame-by-frame.

Posted by The Meal from Firestone, CO on 03/04/21 at 06:44 PM ET

(Also, we’re seeing a video, compressed by the YT algorithm, while one assumes the league officials have the luxury of seeing the higher-quality raw footage.  I don’t need that raw footage to form a conclusive decision, but I’m sure something better was available at the time the decision was made.)

Posted by The Meal from Firestone, CO on 03/04/21 at 06:47 PM ET

Thanks for your insight, The Meal. I think I agree with you, but darn, in real time that’s so close and I hate seeing the little creativity still left in the game being called back by video review.

Posted by shazam88 from SoCal on 03/04/21 at 07:22 PM ET