Postseason officiating irritates Cam

BRUINS NOTEBOOK

With the Bruins’ 2017-18 season a week and a half gone, team president Cam Neely had a calmness about him yesterday that comes with the offseason.

However, when the subject of the officiating in the playoffs came up, the agitation level rose in the NHL Hall of Famer.

The B’s were on the wrong end of several calls, none more damaging than the non-call on Nikita Kucherov’s takedown of Charlie McAvoy that set up Steven Stamkos’ game-tying goal in Game 5 at the Garden. The Lightning won the game in overtime to go back to Tampa up 3-1 in the series. They closed it out in five games.

“I think (the officiating in general) does need to be addressed because the game’s gotten faster and there was a lot of great, exciting matchups in the playoffs and a lot of the talk was, not just in our series but in other series, about the officiating,” said Neely. “The thing that disappoints me most about it for us is, not taking anything away from Tampa, but I felt like we should have been going back for Game 5 tied 2-2, and that’s a whole different mindset than going down there 3-1. You can say all you want about ‘Let’s focus on one game’ but as a player you really look at the big picture and say ‘Man, we have to win three in a row against this team.’ It’s a lot different mindset.

“How they don’t make that call, we’re up 3-2 with seven minutes to go, we should be going on the power play, whether we score or not, it chews up two minutes of the game and we have a different mindset going down to Tampa. It’s the non-calls that really frustrated me the most. I’m not complaining about what calls we had against us. For me, there were three in particular that really bothered — the non-call on the (Brad) Marchand slash (by Anton Stralman) in Game 2, Kevan Miller got a boarding call and in the same game and same situation (David Pastrnak) was hit from behind and there was no call late in the game and then, of course, the no-call on McAvoy.

“Those three for me were tough to take.”

Neely would be open to more input from eyes in the sky, to a certain extent.

“”I’ll give you the example of Pasta getting a four-minute penalty (for high-sticking Victor Hedman when it was Hedman’s own stick that hit the Lightning defenseman),” said Neely. “It would take two seconds for someone to call down and say ‘Hey, it was his own stick that did it. It’s a noncall.’ Something like that is easy. The puck off the glass in the Toronto series that was called straight out? That’s an easy call.”

Neely believes the league has to conduct a hard review of the officiating.

“With all the great playoff series and what was the common theme amongst reporters across the league? It was either the refereeing or then Marchand’s licking. So it took away from the great game that we have,” said Neely.

Lickety split

Speaking of the Marchand licking of the Lightning’s Ryan Callahan, both Neely and owner Jeremy Jacobs gave their two cents.

“Brad should be contrite,” said Neely. “He was spoken to, and I don’t want to go into the details, but he understands how it put a negative focus on him, his family, the organization, his teammates, coaching staff. The thing that people don’t understand is Brad is a really good guy. If you don’t know him, you see the other stuff and you don’t think highly of him.”

Jacobs added, “(At first) I saw humor in it, but as it went along it got pretty silly and not productive toward the team.”

Noncommital on Nash

On big trade acquisition Rick Nash, Neely said he wasn’t the same player after he suffered a concussion on March 17.

Neely didn’t sound like he was against re-signing the power forward for the right price.