Let the boys play — ditch the coach’s challenge
Upon further review, clumsy system saps emotion from playoff excitement
Question: If we can all admit that hockey is in the midst of another dead puck era, then why is the National Hockey League operating a catch-and-release program for goals?
As if it has so many in these playoffs — 4.84 per game entering Monday’s play — that it can afford to throw some of them back, wagging an officious finger at the undeserving.
Answer: somewhere along the line, hockey (and baseball, for that matter) fell prey to the same fixation with slow-motion replay as the National Football League.
Now throw in another NFL innovation/plague, the coach’s challenge, and here they go down the same, grindingly slow, emotion-sucking appeal path — video review, then a review of the review, then widening the parameters of the review — that has resulted in such triumphs as the NFL’s microscopic post-mortem of every pass reception on which the receiver comes in contact with the ground, or the shadow of his second shoe falls over a speck of white paint from the sideline.
It’s the ultimate “gotcha” tool: replay showing the possibility that at the moment the puck crossed the blue line, an attacking player on the off-wing had the blade of his trailing skate an inch off the ice, though the skate itself hadn’t yet crossed the plane of the line into the opponent’s zone.
“We’re challenging that!” cries the coach of the scored-upon team, at which point we are apt to go into full snooze mode for several minutes while the matter is referred to the Supreme Court for forensic dissection.
And now and then, a go-a-lie-interference query is tagged on, for good measure, so we get another long delay to determine whether someone’s stick contacted The Untouchable One on the pads or the glove, rendering him powerless to stop the puck.
At some point, guys, can’t a great athletic effort, or even a gritty, hard-nosed one, just be rewarded?
“The league wants to get more goals, but it seems like the rule is doing a good job of taking good goals away,” the Blackhawks’ Marian Hossa said earlier this season, after a Chicago goal was called back for goalie interference.
It all comes back to an impossible dream: that every call, in every situation, must be 100-percent correct. That the players can make a dozen mistakes each, every game, but if an official makes the tiniest one on a play unseeable by the naked eye, it’s suddenly an affront to the game.
People use the term “human element” with contempt.
In truth, the mandate to get it right — which is every unimaginative drone’s justification for replay’s expanding role in deciding games — fails as often as it succeeds.
Getting it right, except in those rare black-and-white cases, is in the eye of the beholder. Shown the same piece of video, right there on the firing line, even four officials often can’t agree.
Goaltender interference? It’s a coin-toss.
The other day, the Tampa Bay Lightning coach, Jon Cooper, could be seen sprinting down the hall to his team’s dressing room where his replay guy would tell him whether there were grounds for challenging a Detroit goal. Offside, interference, bad breath, not extending the pinky … whatever.
The St. Louis Blues got absolutely robbed in Game 2, losing a potential winning goal on an infinitesimal offside challenge, losing another challenge of goalie interference on Andrew Shaw’s winning goal for Chicago.
In the Minnesota-Dallas series, a circus goal off the skate of the Stars’ Antoine Roussel was ruled good after replay, for reasons unknown, though he made a distinct kicking motion, albeit from behind the net.
A Rangers goal on which Derick Brassard appeared to be offside was upheld. An Aaron Ekblad goal that would have given Florida a 3-0 lead was called back for a nearly invisible offside many seconds earlier. The Islanders came back to win in overtime.
To their credit, the victims of the lost goals or controversial challenges have accepted the rulings with stiff upper lips.
St. Louis coach Ken Hitchcock, whose job is on the line if his team goes out in the first around again, wrote off Game 2 as the price of playing against the champions. You better win by a knockout.
“I’ve been on that side. I’ve seen how it works. Tie goes to the runner,” he said after Game 2.
In 1999, his Dallas team won the Cup on a triple-OT goal that was allowed despite Brett Hull’s entire skate being in the Buffalo crease at a time when the letter of law wouldn’t allow so much as a toenail in the blue paint.
It was an awful rule, and it was changed by the next season.
And that is exactly what should happen with the coach’s challenge. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but …
Like baseball’s new slide rule, the can of worms it opened isn’t worth the cost. The proliferation of opportunities for managers to cause long delays over minute rules interpretations has many participants wishing they could get a mulligan on the unblinking eye of Big Brother.
Once in a very long while, a goal will ensue from an egregious offside but the Situation Room is sitting right there, in front of a monitor.
Goaltender interference, same deal. If it’s a no-doubter, it can be corrected by the eye in the sky. If it’s borderline, let the boys play.
Tie goes to the scorer.