NHL launches clock probe
This season had been tough enough for the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Wednesday, it became even tougher. With time winding down at the Staples Center in an NHL game between Columbus and Los Angeles, and with the Kings on the power play, the clock appeared to have frozen at 1.8 seconds remaining for more than a full second. The extra ticks allowed the Kings to score the winning goal with less than a second left in a 3-2 victory.
The NHL said it will look into the issue, though league executive Colin Campbell told TSN on Thursday the game won’t be replayed.
“We’re not questioning (the clock operator’s) integrity,” he told the Columbus Dispatch. “But we’re going to open all doors and examine everything, to see what happened and how we can keep it from happening again.”
Commissioner Gary Bettman said the NHL is taking it seriously, but admitted sometimes human error can influence the outcome of games. Bettman was careful to say he didn’t know if a mistake was made Wednesday.
“Now i know lots of people are going to say, ‘How can you have a mistake?’ Well, unfortunately or fortunately, our game is full of mistakes — by players, by coaches and occasionally by officials — and on some levels it’s no different than if a guy makes a bad penalty call, puts a team on the power play and they score the winning goal. It happens. We don’t like when it happens and our job is to minimize mistakes,” Bettman said on his weekly radio show. “We don’t want any, but obviously when you have a human element in any aspect of the game you’re going to have it. If we had any reason to believe that this was intentional, we would deal with it in a whole different way, but we’re going to investigate it, get to the bottom of it.”
Jackets gm scott hows on addressed the issue on his blog, but took the post down later: “It is an amazing coincidence that with the Kings on a power play at Staples Center and with a mad scramble around our net in the dying seconds of the third period of a 2-2 hockey game that the clock stopped for at least one full second. . . . Either there was a deliberate stopping of the clock or the clock malfunctioned.”
Kings gm dean lombardi said there was no extra time added to the game and the delay was just the display syncing up with the internal clock.