Yeah, I saw stuff like that when I briefly worked at a broker dealer. No pros or anything, but like a college basket ball ring was generally seen as enough to distinguish yourself.
This person wrote a very long article to say something we already know. Penalties in NHL hockey are too subjective and selectively enforced. It would be much better to have more objectivity and consistency.
Itâs a lot of work to do this, but I would love to see someone go back over maybe a whole yearâs worth of hockey games and âcorrectâ the penalties. Yeah, it wonât be accurate no matter what you do since as soon as you change one penalty call, the rest of the game would not have played out as it did. But even so, it would still be useful to illustrate the difference between what was called and what would have been called strictly by the book over a significant sample size of games.
Itâs going to take a long time to get there, but hopefully a computer can call the penalties within my lifetime.
The NBA does this! Official ruling for every call and non-call in the last 2 minutes of close games.
https://official.nba.com/2020-21-nba-officiating-last-two-minute-reports/
Somewhat infamously, the Houston Rockets did their own internal version for one whole game from the playoffs a few years ago. Daryl Morey, patron saint of NBA analytics nerds, was their GM at the time. They didnât send the memo to the league, but it got leaked. Of course it got leaked. It really came off as the nerdiest way possible for a professional sports team to cry about losing.
The full report obtained by ESPN lists 81 total calls, non-calls and violations. It concludes that those 81 instances cost Houston a total of 18.6 points in that game.
âReferees likely changed the eventual NBA champion,â says the memo, addressed to Byron Spruell, the NBAâs president of league operations. âThere can be no worse result for the NBA.â
It wasnât even in the finals! They gave themselves credit for winning the next series too!
If youâre a coaching staff, it would be negligent not to do this. To the best of your ability you need to know if your players are playing their best. If a player is actually committing too many penalties, you have to coach them out of it. If theyâre just getting called for a lot of penalties, but arenât actually doing anything wrong, you have to help them psychologically so they donât change their behavior unnecessarily.
The Flyers-Capitals game today was thoroughly entertaining.
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I tuned in at the start of the second, and WHAT A RIDE.
I tuned in at the start of the second, and WHAT A RIDE.
You already missed some stuff there with Ovi first scoring on a perfect shot and then setting up another goal with a ridiculous play. As a Flyers fan it was really frustrating, but at the same time I couldnât help but concede that it was great stuff. Then to close the first Flyers have a great chance. Goalie stops the first attempt. Rebound gets shot off the crossbar and post and doesnât drop in the net, but the crease. Thankfully Laughton was there for the tap-in.
Kind of hilarious. Ovechkin has one of the best games of his life (thouh admittedly probably at best top 25), and gets upstaged by a bottom-six center with Laughton getting a hat trick.
Deep dive on the dysfunction of the Arizona Coyotes organization. Even for someone who doesnât care about hockey or this garbage fire team, this is such a familiar story we have seen before and will see again. A close look at a specific example of the kind of behavior we see damaging our entire society.
Hall of fame goalie says make the goal bigger:
Is ESPN going to actually report on hockey now that theyâre going to broadcast it?
"We interrupt this FOOTBALL game to bring you breaking news. Madison Square Garden has apparently flooded! And the heating is broken, so everything is frozen.
Despite it all, theyâre letting fans into the building."
ESPN hasnât aired hockey before? Theyâre a sports network.
Oh, they even had the license before. The problem is that ESPN didnât have the license, so they are seen as having neglected hockey content in favor of sports that they also broadcast, thus double-dipping because their sports-reporting is also an advert for their sports broadcasts.
However, some of that perception is kind of unfair. They have some very good hockey writers at ESPN. Unfortunately a large chunk of it is also pay-walled.
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Not since before the lockout in the 2000s IIRC. They also rarely cover hockey on any of their news programs. Sportscenter will maybe show a hockey highlight if itâs truly ridiculous. The guys on PTI might mention it a bit if thereâs a big news, or it gets close to the Finals. Otherwise, ESPN as a whole doesnât give hockey much airtime at all.
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Everybody knows that officiating in most sports, especially when it comes to calling penalties, is far from objective. NBA refs give star players the benefit of the doubt on foul calls. Soccer refs donât call players for diving even when itâs so flagrant. Ice hockey is no exception.
NHL refs often call more or fewer penalties based on their mood and the mood of the game. Itâs called game management. Basically an open secret. The NHL or any ref will never admit to it, but everyone knows it.
If a ref makes a bad call on one team, thereâs no way for them to undo it. Instead what theyâll do is either let the team they feel they unfairly penalized get away with some stuff for at least a little while. Meanwhile they watch the other team like a hawk trying to find even the slightest thing to call a penalty on to even things up.
If a game is moving smoothly with lots of exciting back and forth action, and the players arenât getting belligerent, the refs tend to turn a blind eye to a penalty here or there. Meanwhile if players are getting angry at each other, refs will start calling penalties on every little thing to keep things under control.
None of this is good. Refs should call players every single time if they commit a penalty. They should never call a player if they donât commit a penalty. If it turns out that it means one team goes in the box 20 times and the other team is disciplined and goes in 0 times, so be it. If it means an exciting back and forth game has to stop play because of a penalty, so be it. We want objective officiating, and we know weâve never had it.
There are many ways we can try to achieve it, but thatâs a discussion for another time.
Something very interesting just happened. Referee Tim Peel was caught on a hit mic during a game.
â⌠there wasnât much, but I wanted to get a **** penalty against Nashville earlyâŚâ
Basically heâs admitting out loud on the record what everyone knows. He isnât calling penalties objectively. He is using penalty calls as part of a game management strategy.
So what happened?
https://twitter.com/PR_NHL/status/1374716621978238977?s=09
Heâs out. As the pro wrestling fans would say, the NHL has to protect the kayfabe. They do their best to maintain the illusion that officiating is objective. There is little doubt that almost every single ref in the NHL, or possibly all of ice hockey, is guilty of this. Yes, that includes everyoneâs favorite Wes McCauley. Tim Peel is just the one who unfortunately got caught and has to suffer the consequences. I donât think this is fair that Tim should be scapegoated for a systemic problem. Then again, he was part of the problem. Then again, there is nothing stopping an individual NHL ref from actually doing their best to make objective calls, they just donât.
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Some added context is that Peel is considered one of the worst refs in the league. He was subject of a lot of derision for years. He also got into hot water with the league previously when he shared a picture on social media drinking with hockey writer Greg Wyshynski, who used to run articles called âThe misadventures of Tim Peelâ when he used to be editor of Yahooâs Puck Daddy blog (Wyshynski later admitted that it was unfair to single out Peel).
So while it is unfair that Peel got the axe for this, nobody is exactly unhappy to see him removed.
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ESPN article had this gem:
In 2015, Peel was removed from officiating a New Jersey Devils home game after being photographed at a bar drinking with a reporter. [Editorâs note: The reporter was ESPNâs Greg Wyshynski, the writer of this piece.]
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