Baffling calls on the in-crease
DALLAS— As one of four men to coach more than 1,500 regular-season NHL games, Ken Hitchcock has presumably seen more random hockey anomalies than most human beings.
But even Hitchcock had to chuckle Thursday when he was asked if he gets a gut feeling about the impending outcome of any given goaltender interference challenge as the officials peruse their penalty-box tablet as they converse via headset with the NHL situation room.
“No,” Hitchcock said, speaking before his Dallas Stars faced the Maple Leafs at American Airlines Center. “But I’m making money on the some of the bets. So it’s working good.”
The coach was joking, of course. Such is the inexplicable, unpredictable nature of the goalie interference lottery that you’d need to be a serious problem gambler to actually wager on such things. Now 21⁄
2 seasons into the NHL’s dance with this particular debacle, there’s too often no way of rationally explaining its outcome. It’s a coin flip, as Maple Leafs fans have come to be reminded this week.
Monday night in Toronto, Auston Matthews scores while making what looks like inconsequential contact with Colorado goaltender Jonathan Bernier — this at a moment when Bernier appeared to have zero chance of recovering to make a save. Upon further review — no goal.
Wednesday night in Chicago, Blackhawks forward Artem Anisimov is lying on top of Frederik Andersen as Chicago’s Nick Schmaltz scores a goal and — hey, no harm, good goal.
Leafs coach Mike Babcock, who is usually not shy about pronouncing from the mount on most topics, seemed angry enough in the wake of the latter instance that he didn’t even bother to utter actual words in response to a question about it. He simply shrugged and declined to express his palpable disgust.
But Babcock spoke clearly when he was asked earlier this week if he knows what goaltender interference is any more. “No,” said Babcock. And therein lies a problem — one that the hockey world appears to be coming to accept won’t go away without an adjustment by the league.
“It can be complicated . . . I think there’s grey areas in it. It needs to be a little bit more black and white for me,” said Tyler Seguin, the veteran Stars all-star. “There needs to be some kind of line.”
Well, exactly. But drawing that line is the tricky part. As Andersen said after Wednesday’s 3-2 overtime win in Chicago, this after he was asked about the play in which Anisimov belly flopped onto Andersen’s numbers.
“I mean, I don’t know,” Andersen said. “You never know.”
One thing we do know: There’s little disincentive for trying one’s luck. A lost timeout — the current cost for a failed coach’s challenge of goaltender interference — is barely a cost at all. Slapping unsuccessful challengers with an actual penalty — as the league did this season with failed offside challenges — would surely cut down on the number of shot-in-the-dark reviews launched by coaches whose teams give up crucial goals late in games.
Hitchcock, for his part, has his own concerns about what the current setup is doing to the sport.
“The goalie challenge is significant for me because of the way we teach . . . You tell the guy to get to the net. And then he gets to the net with the puck and there’s no goal,” Hitchcock said. “And so now the players are questioning (coaches). And that’s the scary part that I knew we were going to get into. The players are questioning us. Why are you having us have these drive drills? Why are we doing this stuff when there’s no goal. What’s the point? So that’s the part that bothers me.”
Not that there aren’t perfectly reasonable approaches to avoiding such controversies.
“Well, just don’t touch the goalie,” Jamie Benn, the Stars captain, said Thursday. “That’s probably your best way of not getting the call turned back. But it’s a tough decision for the league and the officials. The game’s fast and it happens quick, so they’re trying to do their best as well.”
Not everyone is as charitable about the process. This is a league starving for goals that’s concocted a way to erase them with a video nitpicking that too often seems arbitrary. Just last week Hitchcock’s team had a goal overturned via coach’s challenge after it was deemed that Stars forward Alexander Radulov bumped Columbus goaltender Joonas Korpisalo as he carried a puck to the goalmouth. Radulov’s contact with Korpisalo was more than incidental — it was far more substantial than, say, Matthews’s brush with Bernier earlier this week. It was the kind of decision that actually made some sense according to the rulebook; Radulov did, after all, appear to impede Korpisalo’s ability to make a save.
But a week later, it said something that Hitchcock was still making a philosophical argument against the call. It said the grey areas of bluepaint video review aren’t going away any time soon.
“I get that you’ve got to allow a guy to make a save. But if a guy is willing to play with courage and determination and get to the net with the puck right there, and he’s willing to pay that price, there should be a reward for paying that price,” Hitchcock said. “Sometimes there is a collision. And sometimes you do get into the goalie where there’s a rebound that comes there. But if you’re going to bring the puck into a really competitive area, a tough area, an area that’s very uncomfortable for the guy with the puck, there should be a reward for that. That’s the part that bothers me.”