The list of wrong or non-calls this postseason runs longer than most attention spans, but its impact might begin to metastasize for two reasons that really unnerve the league’s pilots. One is that the league seems enthusiastic about negating the talents of its truly gifted players in the postseason. The Hockey News reported that, after the four-game Edmonton-Winnipeg series, Rachel Doerrie, a former NHL consultant completing a master’s in data and analytics, isolated no fewer than 37 violations against Edmonton’s Connor McDavid, the league’s most ascendant star. None of them were called. McDavid did not draw a penalty in this postseason or last. With that degree of enforcement just as the league is starting a new seven-year deal with ESPN, the boardrooms of the NHL have to know their untapped hockey markets will only descend further into the well-established confusion that keeps the league standing in its own way.

Why are penalties in the second period not penalties late in the third? Why are penalties in the regular season not penalties in the postseason? These are ageless, interminably confusing hockey questions among people who are either casual fans or are non-fans, a.k.a the future of the league. Well, let me speak directly to those people: YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO UNDERSTAND THIS!

-Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette where you can read more on this topic.