Articles in Officiating

from Damien Cox at the Toronto Star,

Since the dawn of time — which for NHL fans, was 1917 — it has been an annual rite of spring to complain about officiating.

We get that. The team that loses complains loudest. Few NHL champions have spent much time during their victory parades registering their unhappiness with how their games were officiated.

Some want more calls. Some want fewer calls. Some say let them play. Some say letting them play simply allows the less talented players to slow down the stars.

The different points of view, and the fact it’s usually the losers doing the complaining, has allowed hockey administrators to get away with a lot of lazy explanations over the years. Pretty much since the day Gary Bettman assumed office, his stock answer has been to say NHL officials “are the best in the world” and to annually express satisfaction with the fine work they do.

Which is a lot of ingenuous fiction. Indeed, under Bettman, there have been many changes to NHL officiating in recent years. Many officials have retired early or been fired. They had the names taken off their striped jerseys to make each individual more anonymous. A second referee was added in 1998, which was a tacit acknowledgement that an awful lot of calls were being missed.

The rules have frequently changed. There have been “crackdowns.” Sometimes that extra enforcement has lasted, sometimes it hasn’t.

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from Adam Proteau of The Hockey News,

The answer, of course, is that there is no way to guarantee officials are perfect, and there’s not going to be a way, either now or down the road, to make them perfect. There will always be a degree of subjectivity in the interpretation of the rules, and that is not going to change.

This isn’t to say we can’t do better on the officiating front. This writer has advocated numerous times for the addition of a third referee in the NHL, one who would occupy an “eye-in-the-sky” position off the ice and could buzz in with a stoppage of play when they see some infraction the on-ice officials have missed.

Using a third referee would be a notable change, but people said there would be terrible difficulties when the NHL went from a single referee for games to two referees for games, beginning in the 1998-99 season. For the six decades years prior to that, only one referee was the norm and was what everyone was accustomed to. But fans, players, coaches and officials all adjusted, and we’d argue the game is better officiated now because of that change.

The same could and would happen with three referees. But even then, mistakes would be made, calls would be missed, and people in all cities would begrudge officials for “bias” against them. To the contrary – fans have to recognize the increased speed of the game makes it impossible for hockey referees to get everything right. And if there was a legitimate case to be made for referees having a bias against a player or team, the league would move very quickly to address the problem. But most officials are admirably professional in all their tasks.

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