tbcwpg
Moderator
- Jan 25, 2011
- 16,212
- 19,099
I give you credit for staying with your opinion but as a Jets fan how does it not piss you off that people are trying to say that the Jets wouldn't have won if there was better officiating .
Because I A) know that's not true, B) I know that the author of this article doesn't believe its just reffing either, and C) I don't really care if people are trying to say that.
Honestly, I don’t think the officiating has as much to do with peoples disinterest as you think. Calls or not, McDavid still looked pretty electric to me, it wasn’t the reason they lost. Having the stars of the game play on well constructed, competitive teams is far more important than ensuring every possible infraction gets called. While NHL officiating sucks, it’s not the biggest problem the NHL has with its entertainment value.
It may not be the biggest problem but it is A problem, for sure.
Even if McDavid is naturally going to be able to draw more penalties (which is being proposed here without evidence, but seems like a reasonable surmise, so I’ll assume this to be true), there will be other players who are great at drawing penalties too (Scheifele, Ehlers, PLD, etc.). How many penalties did they draw? How many were missed on them? I have no idea, no one laser-focused on all the obstructions against them.
Writing the article this slanted does a disservice to the actual root of the problem — that the NHL has a different rulebook in the playoffs. He acknowledges that the Oilers had missed penalties too, but then goes on to whine about McDavid.
For drawing power — it would be interesting to know how much a dramatic overhaul of how the game is called in the playoffs would help with viewership. Is the casual fan going to care that much? An unfair comparison, maybe; an anecdote, most definitely; but I am a casual NBA fan and I’ll watch the playoffs but I’ve never been drawn to any player matchups.
Is McDavid scoring a few dozen more PP points going to help with ratings? Maybe in Edmonton if the team goes on a run. As far Edmonton succeeding more if he scores more, sure, perhaps that happens and it leads to the Matthews vs. McDavid matchup the NHL would oh so dearly want. But is that matchup worth enough that the NHL should radically overhaul how they call the game in the playoffs as to influence the game to help ensure this matchup? I don’t think so. Not only are there people who DO enjoy how playoff hockey is right now, but I’m not sure the Matthews/McDavid matchup would be as big of a deal as you propose it to be. There will always be storylines for the NHL to market.
Also, superstars aren’t even suffering really with how the game is called now. MacKinnon is tearing the league apart right now. Crosby and Ovechkin, the two most marketable names in hockey in the past 15 years, both just recently won the Cup. “Playoff rules” never hampered them, should we readjust because one star can’t bust through (without first attributing this lack of success not to missed calls, but to a team that is so poorly constructed that one player was in on over half their goals this season and whose coach didn’t trust more than six forwards and four defensemen in overtime)?
I will concede the point that it's way more obvious with McDavid because he doesn't have a team of superstars surrounding him. Crosby and Ovechkin had a lot of supporting help. Also, they're just bigger and can handle it better than McDavid can, for sure.
You don’t lose 4 straight games because of the refs. That’s just flat out stupid.
(I realize I'm quoting you twice) I don't think myself or Dom ever made that argument.