from Travis Yost of TSN,

One of the biggest challenges facing officiating in the NHL is the effort to mitigate bias or persuasion as much as humanly possible.

I say humanly possible because it’s critical to note that the referees calling penalties and overseeing the run of play aren’t automatons. Despite rigorous training and a wealth of experience, it’s inevitable that at some point in time, an official will slide under the microscope of a fan base that believes their team has been unfairly victimized by the whistle.

I will defend referees to some degree here: I think examples like Stephane Auger and Alex Burrows are few and far between. We don’t have more than a handful of examples linking an official to a player or a team in a negative fashion, and I think that speaks volumes about the kind of training referees enjoy before getting to the NHL level. More than anything else, the NHL – all sports leagues, for that matter – work to protect their product against these scathing allegations. The credibility of the game must be preserved, and any thought or effort to submarine it generally ends in an official being pushed out of the league.

What I do find problematic is that referees, collectively, seem to prioritize balancing the power of a game above all else. This obviously conflicts with their actual priority, which is to observe penalties and call them accordingly.

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