Upon further review, the reviews are here to stay
It’s all well and good the NHL did some old-fashioned, pie-in-the-sky, out-of-the-box pondering of the whys and wherefores of the great frozen game this week in Florida.
But you have to wonder if they would have been better off actually coming up with some hard answers to some vexing questions.
In particular, the league and its hockey operations department are well aware by now that expanding video review to include goalie interference and offside calls has created an absolute nightmare for pretty much everyone involved.
Night after night we see unhappy players and coaches, at least when one of these microscopic calls doesn’t go their way. The latest came Thursday night in Carolina when Hurricanes forward Elias Lindholm put a perfect screen in front of New York Rangers goalie Antti Raanta, who was then helpless to stop Sebastian Aho’s rising wrist shot from the point.
Lindholm was outside the blue paint, and Raanta seemed on the edge of his crease. There looked to be slight contact, barely perceptible, and only noticeable because Raanta looked to be trying to sell the call.
Five years ago — hell, two years ago — nobody would have said a word, the goal would have counted and Canes fans could have gone on with their celebration uninterrupted. Great shot by Aho, nice screen by Lindholm.
But not in the NHL, circa 2017. As soon as a goal is signaled, the call goes out. “To the iPads, lads!” Everyone starts furiously looking at replays on their bench, and we wait for the coach against whom the call has gone to signal for a review, and if a review is requested the entire game goes on hold until that takes place.
Then the referees skate to the benches and explain the result to both coaches. Then the coach who has lost the review, knowing he’s on television, either rolls his eyes or shakes his head, all the time muttering non-sweet nothings. And even that doesn’t end it. “I think the referee made the wrong call,” said Rangers coach Alain Vigneault, after Aho’s goal was allowed to stand following a review that took four, long minutes.
So that’s where we end up. A goal, celebration delayed, then a review, then an explanation, followed by complaining. It was better, or at least quicker, in the old days when we went straight from the goal to the complaining.
Folks, it’s abundantly clear too many replay situations like this are hurting the game. The optics are horrible. Instead of an explosion of human emotion after a goal, we are getting “let’s hold on now” as we are asked to hold our breath and not respond to what we’ve seen until Big Brother confirms it. We get coaches with their heads down looking at devices or holding their earpieces like Secret Service men waiting for word from their video coach, all in a desperate search for something that might allow them reasonable cause to demand a replay review.
The offside situations are even worse, as officials in Toronto desperately peer at replays to determine whether a skate was a millimeter off the ice, often the skate of a player who had nothing whatsoever to do with the goal that was subsequently scored.
Are you making sure calls aren’t missed? Sure, to some degree. But we’ve ended up slicing and dicing video into microbursts in search of this greater truth, producing a reality far worse than the “toe in the crease” rule ever did.
So while all the daydreaming down in Florida was nice and all, it would have been far better if the meetings had produced some concrete changes to fix this growing problem.
We do know that referees are going to be encouraged to force coaches to make their challenges within a “reasonable” period, likely to be 30 to 40 seconds, and there may be a move afoot to refuse consultations with curious coaches after review decisions are made. But every night we see that any rule that is elastic gets stretched, usually until you can’t recognize the original rule anymore.
Those changes mentioned above are likely to have a limited effect. The greater problem is now that the NHL has gone down this path of expanded replay, it’s nearly impossible to walk it back, even if Gary Bettman was moved to do so.
So we’re stuck with it. The best that can be done is to limit the number of challenges to the fewest pos- sible, and there are some who have suggested perhaps an unsuccessful challenge should cost a team more than a timeout. Perhaps it should be a two-minute minor penalty. If you’re going to challenge, you better be damn sure.
As it stands, you could see this getting really ugly in the post-season as coaches and teams continue to be unsatisfied even after video reviews. Even worse is in a league where there aren’t many goals scored, every time one is scored fans are either forced to wait and -see if the goal is validated by replay or hoping against hope that something can be found via review to erase the goal.
In other words, the immediate reaction to “he shoots, he scores!” is no longer in vogue. It’s, “he shoots, he scores, wonder if this will count?”
That just doesn’t work well for a sport that is largely defined by emotion and explosions of passion by players and fans alike. Remember Patrick Kane’s winning goal in the 2010 Stanley Cup final? There was no immediate reaction from anybody because nobody, other than Kane, knew the puck was in. That seems to be the scenario surrounding a lot of goals these days.
Getting rid of it all now seems unlikely. Fixing it, therefore, is the best we can hope for, and it would have been nice if that fix had taken place earlier this week in the Sunshine State. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for The Star. Follow him @DamoSpin. His column appears Tuesday and Saturday.