In a game with such an abnormal amount of calls, including an early first period scenario that saw nine penalties assessed at the same time, it was difficult for the game to form any ebb and flow, or sustain any extended periods of 5-on-5 play. Included in the aforementioned first period scrum, was a since-rescinded game misconduct given to Bruins’ winger Milan Lucic. The penalty was assigned after the officials believed that the B’s hulking winger had illegally left his team’s bench to come to the defense of teammate Shawn Thornton, who was being mugged old-school prison style by six Canuck players. In fairness to the officials, during the heat of the moment, it can be tremendously difficult to make the proper determination, as to if Lucic had indeed left the bench, or not. Bruins’ head coach Claude Julien echoed these sentiments after Saturday’s contest.

“I’m not blaming (the referees) – they’re in the middle of a scrum there – but Looch was on the ice already. It wasn’t an illegal change; he didn’t come off the bench. There are no issues there in my mind; it’s clear.” – Claude Julien

Despite the overwhelmingly absurd number of penalty calls on Saturday afternoon, it was the special teams units of the Bruins that ultimately cost them the game. Albeit on eleven chances, the Black and Gold allowed their Western Conference rivals to put four power-play goals past Tim Thomas during Saturday’s action. The four tallies would be all the Canucks could muster, but was indeed enough for the victory.

“They were making plays, but not necessarily totally by their movement. Like the first goal was a funny bounce, those happen. Especially on good teams with good power plays. Other ones they were utilizing the screen real well.” – Tim Thomas

On the other end of that spectrum, the Boston power-play posted a less-than-motivating 0-7 spot during Saturday’s game, and were completely shut-down by the Vancouver penalty-killers. Credit where credit is due, as the Canuck PKers did an excellent job in keeping the Bruins’ offense to the outside of the proverbial “box”.

Scoring first was Ryan Kesler, who corralled a rebound towards the tail end of a 5-on-3 advantage and fired it past Thomas at the 5:41 mark of the first frame.

“We’ve faced adversity before and normally we try to kill those and unfortunately today we didn’t, we didn’t kill it, but hopefully we improve for the next game.” – Daniel Paille

Not to be outdone, the B’s bounced back just over nine minutes later, when Brad Marchand beat Schneider with a back-hander after a pretty little feed from fellow sophomore Tyler Seguin Boston would take their first and only lead of the day, when Rich Peverley took advantage of an Alexander Edler turnover and beat Schneider with a glove side wrister.

From that point on, the Canucks would dominate most of the action, pinning the B’s in their own zone for a good portion of the remainder of the game. To end the second frame, Vancouver would use tallies from Alex Burrows and Henrik Sedin to grab a 3-2 lead heading into the final twenty.

Arguably the best player on the ice for either team, Canucks’ rookie Cody Hodgson would register his tenth of the season with a blistering slapshot that managed to get past the reigning Vezina trophy winner, and into the Boston net. The B’s would add one more as David Krejci was able to tap home a Joe Corvo rebound on the back-hand only 0:42 seconds later, but were unable to muster up enough to get a tying goal, throughout the remainder of the period, as the Canucks held on for a 4-3 victory.

From The Room:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Cory Schneider (Vancouver)

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Paille

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Henrik Sedin (Vancouver)

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Kelly

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Thomas

KEY STATS

Goals–                       VAN (4)                   BOS (3)

Shots–                       VAN (36)                 BOS (39)

Power-Play–           VAN (4-11)                BOS (0-7)

Penalty-Kill–           VAN (7-7)                    BOS (7-11)

• Ben’s Three Stars– ….. 3.) Nathan Horton ….. 2.) Cody Hodgson   ….. 1.) Cory Schneider

What’s Next?

The B’s will continue their four-game home-stand on Tuesday when they host Dustin Byfuglien and the Winnipeg Jets at TD Garden. The Canucks will head south for a set of games in Florida, with a showdown with the Lightning slated for Monday and a face-off against the Panthers on Tuesday.

Thanks For Reading!

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Penalties are always a major source of discussion when watching a hockey game. Referees at any level have a thankless job that will always leave someone unhappy. As a player and a fan, all you’re looking for from the men in the stripes is consistency. If you’re going to make a call in the first and second, you should make the same call in the third.

Unfortunately, most of the NHL referees don’t do this.

Let’s start with some background information.  In the 2009-2010 season, there were 12328 penalties called, which works out to about 10 per game (as there are 1230 games in each regular season).

The breakdown by period is:

• First period: 4062
• Second period: 4420
• Third period: 3745
• Overtime: 101

Now here are the most common calls, broken out by period. Pay special attention to Hooking and Interference:

The interesting thing to note here is that there’s a drastic difference in Hooking and Interference between the first two periods and the third period. In fact, those two penalties decrease 27% between the second and the third periods. All other calls (not including Fighting) decrease just 8%.

I think this is a big problem because not making these calls slows down the speed of the game in the third. If the Hooking and Interference are happening without being called, then we’re slowly degenerating back to pre-lockout hockey. It also infuriates the players and the fans because there is no consistency in what is happening on the ice from the referees.

You could argue that there are less calls in games that are out of reach, but most games are not out of reach (just look at all the games that go to overtime). Unfortunately, that argument doesn’t hold much water when you look at the numbers of some of the refs. I think 27% is too much of a drop, and the chart below shows the top 12 offenders in the NHL in terms of the % drop in H&I calls from the second to the third period.

A quick word about the numbers shown below: There is no way to identify which referee made each call based on the data publicly available from the NHL. The best I can do is “associate” a call with a ref. That means that when you look at Mr. Auger’s 90 calls in the first period, what I’m really saying is that Mr. Auger worked games where 90 calls were made in the first. He didn’t necessarily make them all. It makes the data slightly less useful, but I think some obvious trends still emerge.

Here are the least consistent referees in the NHL in making Hooking and Interference calls in the third period:

To me, the real problems are the folks who are consistent for two periods and then drop off the planet with their numbers. That would be Justin StPierre, Stephane Auger, Bill McCreary, Rob Martell, Brad Watson and Dennis LaRue. I’m not letting the other guys off of the hook, but they’re inconsistent the entire game. These guys seem to judge the situation and subscribe to the “let the players decide the outcome” mantra. In my mind, if you don’t make the calls, you aren’t letting the players decide. Not making the calls is what let the “Old NHL” be the best source of water-skiing videos that weren’t filmed on a liquid surface. If you want to “let the players decide the outcome”, make the calls consistently.

In case you’re wondering, there were two refs whose calls for H&I actually increased from the second to the third: Greg Kimmerly and Chris Ciamaga. You can see more detail over on the original posts at Igloo Dreams (links at the bottom of this post)

Thoughts are welcomed and encouraged.

If you have ideas for other data to analyze, feel free to suggest them. I have some future posts in the works, but I’m sure there are lots of things I haven’t thought of.

The data that I’m presenting here is from the 2009-2010 regular season. It was gathered from NHL.com play-by-play reports. There were 1230 games in the regular season – I’m missing data from one game. The spelling of the names in this post are as they appear in the box scores of the games on NHL.com

This blog entry is a summarization of two longer, more detailed posts over at Igloo Dreams.  Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

Hi Friends!

Daniel Alfredsson here again, say, did you happen to catch the highlights of our game last night? Particularly around the 14 second mark of this clip?

Well that poor referee certainly appears to be in quite a lot of pain, the look on his face is excruciating.

I’d hate for that sort of thing to start happening on a regular basis. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

Although … now that you mention it my Ottawa Senators do happen to be the most penalized team in the league AND the team with the fewest power play opportunities. Why those sort of statistics are enough to make a normally placid group of guys … well do almost anything to ‘fix’ the situation.

You may have heard some disturbing rumours after the 2 games where we didn’t get a single power play or the 3 games where we only had one. It’s all just nonsense, you know how players like to gossip, the very idea is ludicrous. Almost as silly as averaging 2 powerplays on the road when the league average is 4.

Sure, I may have been seen making calls on disposable cell phones and dropping off cash filled envelopes to shadowy figures in parking lots but that doesn’t mean I’m plotting some sort of ‘imminent violent reprisal’ if things don’t change. I truly wish the best for you and hope that you enjoy happy, injury free times for what’s left of your careers.

P.S. I ran into Kerry Fraser yesterday, looks like he won’t be able to officiate tomorrow’s game; apparently he fell down some stairs.

Warmest Regards,

Alfie

Is it time for the NHL to review how penalties are called?

If you didn’t catch the Dallas Stars-Calgary Flames game last week, there was an overtime penalty called that ended up costing the Stars the game. Nicklas Grossman was called for a delay of game penalty after he shot a puck over the glass. It was a bad judgement call to say the least. Grossman shot the puck out of play from the neutral zone, two feet past his own blue line when it was thought he was behind the blue line. The result was a 4-on-3 powerplay for the Flames and Jarome Iginla scored shortly after the penalty was called.

Errors like this can happen. It’s unfortunate, but split second decisions are a tough thing to get right. But do these kinds of decisions need to be made in split seconds?

I don’t think so.

Why can’t referee’s use video replay to get the call right? The play is dead, a new puck is needed and there’s going to be a faceoff anyways. The time it would add to any given hockey game would be well worth it to ensure correct calls are made. Yes, it might push games over the 2 1/2 hour sweet spot the NHL has tried to maintain, but it’s important for teams and for the NHL’s general credibility.

Would it second guess referee’s on-ice judgement? It’s a glass half full/half empty debate. I look at it like reinforcing the right call – another weapon in the arsenal; the glass half full. Imagine the Dallas Stars miss the playoffs by one point this season. That could make or break the season and careers (players and management) as well as cost the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. All because we didn’t take 30-45 seconds to view a replay?

I’m not suggesting referee’s use video replay every time an infraction is thought to be made. Many penalties are called by the discretion of the NHL referee’s and I’m fine with that. But for black and white calls (such as this delay of game example), why not give ref’s the option of video replay?

The emphasis should be on making the right call. And had the referee’s used video replay last week, the Stars wouldn’t have lost that point – at least not on a sequence that wasn’t their fault.

All pro sports go through similar pains, but I feel like the NHL has seen more than it’s fair share of defining (and avoidable) blunders. In keeping with the Dallas theme and fresh off the heels of Brett Hull’s Hockey Hall of Fame induction, who can forget his Stanley Cup foot-in-the-crease-goal?

Stay classy, video replay needing referee’s.

–

Burgundy is the chief editor for Stayclassy.net. Follow him on Twitter (@Stay_Classy) or email him.

Ray Emery continued his brilliant start, stoning the Devils early, as the Flyers killed off two 5 on 3 situations. Emery was finally solved in the third period, allowing  a powerplay goal and short handed tally, but by then it was all over but the shouting.

Brodeur plans to save all the pucks that got past him to remember his 1000th NHL game

There’s really not a whole lot to add to this, so on to Stuff I Noticed:

-Not to harp on it, but Chris Lee is the worst official, in any professional sport, on any planet. He makes Tim Donaghy look like Art Skov. I am sure that we could teach a retarded chimpanzee to skate and he’d be as good or better than Lee.

This guy steals candy from babies, kicks canes out from the hands of the blind and smells like David Crosby's nutsack

- The Flyers have a fourth line now that can cycle the puck in the offensive zone for 30 seconds at a time and look good doing so. This is a far cry from the Dan Line of the late 1990′s. Jesus, those guys sucked.

-Matt Carle played one of, if not his very best games as a Flyer. He was fantastic, outside of one slight mistake in the first period. However, I blame that on Chris Lee.

-Quick Poll: Is Jacques Lemaire a Vampire or The Highlander? The guy’s appearance hasn’t changed in 30 years.

-Thanks to NHL Center Ice for reminding me just how awful the Pittsburgh play by play team is. I’d rather have to listen to Don Johnson’s album for a month than listen to them for a whole game.

The Man Single Handedly Responsible For Karoke In The US

Three Stars, Selected by Corky, from Life Goes On

3. Matt Carle

2. Ian Lapperiere

1. Ray Emery