I don't think I've ever written a column here about hockey or the NHL. Growing up in the Cleveland area probably contributed to my relative lack of interest in the sport next to baseball, basketball, and football, as Cleveland has pro sports teams in all of the latter, but only a minor league team in the way of professional hockey, and that didn't even exist for most of my childhood (I wasn't yet born when the NHL's Cleveland Barons were a thing).
Still, I keep an eye on it, and a controversy arose Monday that is interesting and unique from several angles, but isn't getting a ton of play in the national sports media.
The Montreal Canadiens went into their game hosting the Chicago Blackhawks with a chance to clinch a playoff berth with a win. The game went to a shootout. The Canadiens' Cole Caulfield missed his shot, and the Blackhawks' Frankie Nazar responded by "missing" his.
That brought us too the second round of the shootout, where Patrik Laine of Montreal missed his shot ... and play stopped as the refs conferred on something. The radio crew (I was listening to the game on the Canadiens radio broadcast) was unsure what the stoppage in play was about, but noted that Canadien player Brendan Gallagher, who was close by the officials, seemed angry and agitated at whatever it was they were discussing.
What it turned out to be was this: Nazar's shot actually went in the net. It was a goal. It happened very quickly, and the puck became lodged in the net and camouflaged by the structure of the goal frame. It was assumed the puck had been shot or ricocheted out of play, which happens.
In the aftermath the refs are of course taking a lot of heat for missing the goal, but it seems everybody missed it. The radio announcers called it a miss. Nazar didn't react like he scored.
It took the NHL's "situation room" to spot the error, when they buzzed the refs. While they apparently buzzed the refs in time, play was not stopped for some reason, and Laine took his penalty shot.
It gets weirder. You also can't tell by most TV angles that Nazar scored, either. That might have been that, but Amazon Prime, who broadcasted the game in Canada, put in additional cameras, one of which made clear that Nazar scored according to the Canadiens' radio post game show. Had they not done that, it would not have been discovered until the arena crew broke down the goal frame, when they would presumably find the puck. From that point, you can be assured the knowledge of Nazar's goal would be taken to the grave by its discoverers.
The retroactively-allowed goal was only allowed after Laine had taken his shot. The radio post-game talking heads and their callers has much to say about how unprecedented it is to go back to correct a call after subsequent game action occurs. They're not wrong about that. It's why offenses on football teams who know they just benefitted from a questionable and reviewable call will rush to the line of scrimmage to get off a play before the Powers That Be can stop play and adjudicate the matter.
Not only did they retroactively award the goal Chicago far too late (depending on your point of view), they also did not give Laine a do-over shot. Callers also had much to say that Laine's approach and mindset to his shot might have been different being down 1-0 in the shootout rather than it being 0-0.
They aren't wrong about that, either. That's why it grinds my gears when someone says about, say, a wrongly-disallowed touchdown in the first quarter where said team loses by 5 that the call made "all the difference!" as if the rest of game would've played out the exact same way it did after the non-TD. Google the "butterfly effect."
You might have already guessed the Chicago did indeed win the game, which means Montreal, who is reeling, failed to clinch that playoff berth. How bad are they reeling? They are losers of three in a row as of this writing, and Chicago is the second-worst team in the NHL by points. Not only did Montreal not win, they failed to outshoot Chicago in any period. At home.
They are trying to fend off the Columbus Blue Jackets, who are rolling. How well are they rolling? They've won five in a row, including 14-3 in aggregate their last three games. That includes 11-1 in a home-and-home sweep of the very-good Washington Capitals.
Now the Canadiens will either have to beat Carolina at home, a team that figures to be a much tougher customer than Chicago, or hope Columbus fails to beat the New York Islanders at home in regulation, and the Islanders are bad.
Back to the controversy itself. It's fascinating to me because both the Canadiens' complaint and the Blue Jackets hypothetical complaint if the goal was not allowed aree completely justified (everything I'm reading states the NHL rulebook is unhelpfully vague on the matter, particularly as it applies to shootouts).
Still, and maybe this is my Ohio bias, I feel like the way things played out is the most fair of an unfair situation.
As it stands, Montreal suffers from a defeat under a circumstance — resumption of play followed by a retroactive call reversal — that essentially has never been allowed in North American sports. That sucks. That's unfair.
But, had the refs given priority to that convention, then Chicago would've not been awarded a goal that they very clearly scored.
That would be worse, wouldn't it? I think so. I have been unwavering that, when it comes to all matter of replay, review, and related debates, from VAR in soccer to robot umps in baseball, that nothing, nothing, is more important than getting the call right. Not history, not umpire jobs, not lengthy game delays, nothing. I will go to my grave with that opinion.
The postgame radio guys (to be fair, they were reasonable about the whole thing and not raging homers) also brought up the dreaded slippery-slope argument, saying, "what's next, allowing a goal five minutes after it happened?") That was the only point they made that was a reach. I'm never a fan of the slippery-slope argument anyway, but no, the NHL allowing this goal does not mean they are going to review goals and calls after five minutes of game play. I don't really follow the NHL much and yet I feel like I can promise that.
Anyway, it's all very interesting, and maybe I should give this sport a bigger chance, eh?
Leave a Comment