Lebowski
El Duderino
- Dec 5, 2010
- 17,585
- 5,218
Let me preface this thread by saying I absolutely despise the poor reffing excuse that routinely gets thrown around. They are human and we can't expect a 100% accuracy out of them every night. Your team will inevitably benefit or be hindered by it at some point, and I think it typically balances out over the long term.
That being said, I feel like the NHL got off very easy after the whole Tim Peel incident. Game management isn't something new and I don't think anyone was exactly surprised when Peel openly admitted to it. But for it to be acknowledged out loud, it should have sparked a need for the NHL to makes things more transparent and reestablish confidence in its referees for the sake of preserving the appearance of fairness and impartiality. Instead, to quench the significant pressure coming from the media and fans alike, Tim Peel was made the sacrificial lamb. Beyond that, business as usual.
After last night's game between Vegas and Montreal, I've been wondering if the NHL had any sort of quality control about its referees and if so, how they are evaluated and if corrective measures are ever, if at all, implemented.
If we agree on the idea that game management shouldn't be a thing and that the rulebook should simply be called as it is; it is only natural that penalty minutes would tend to be uneven between two teams on any given night. That's something most people would probably agree to in theory, but that would be an incredibly hard pill to swallow for most rabid fans when their team gets the short end of the stick. Similar to how the Apple music shuffle isn't completely random by design to make it feel more random to us, I think some form of game management is needed to make things appear more fair to the fans.
I think the bigger issue lies within the more obvious penalties that don't get called because it's in overtime, and the weaker, made-up calls that only serve the purpose of evening up the scale. These are the calls, or non-calls, that I think hurt the fans' trust in referees the most. These are the calls for which I feel the referees should be held accountable. To be fair, they probably already are. I'd expect the NHL to already have a system in place to evaluate the refs performance. But I think there has to be transparency in that regard to restore, to a certain degree, confidence in the league.
My suggestion is this: it would seem fairly simple to implement a review committee that would evaluate both the calls and non-calls made by refs and translate that into an accuracy% metric on a game-to-game basis. Over a large enough sample size, the fairer, better performing refs would naturally come out on top and these are the ones that should be favored for games played on the bigger stage, notably the playoffs. Implement a passing grade and those that fail to reach a certain accuracy % over a given sample size would simply have to be let go.
And make it public. Make it a stats page on NHL.com for everyone to see. Make individual game accuracy % ratings public as well. Give refs a game log with their stats just like players while you're at it.
Would that be a good or a bad thing? Is reffing even an issue that needs to be addressed in your mind or has it always been that way throughout all sports and we just have to deal with it?
That being said, I feel like the NHL got off very easy after the whole Tim Peel incident. Game management isn't something new and I don't think anyone was exactly surprised when Peel openly admitted to it. But for it to be acknowledged out loud, it should have sparked a need for the NHL to makes things more transparent and reestablish confidence in its referees for the sake of preserving the appearance of fairness and impartiality. Instead, to quench the significant pressure coming from the media and fans alike, Tim Peel was made the sacrificial lamb. Beyond that, business as usual.
After last night's game between Vegas and Montreal, I've been wondering if the NHL had any sort of quality control about its referees and if so, how they are evaluated and if corrective measures are ever, if at all, implemented.
If we agree on the idea that game management shouldn't be a thing and that the rulebook should simply be called as it is; it is only natural that penalty minutes would tend to be uneven between two teams on any given night. That's something most people would probably agree to in theory, but that would be an incredibly hard pill to swallow for most rabid fans when their team gets the short end of the stick. Similar to how the Apple music shuffle isn't completely random by design to make it feel more random to us, I think some form of game management is needed to make things appear more fair to the fans.
I think the bigger issue lies within the more obvious penalties that don't get called because it's in overtime, and the weaker, made-up calls that only serve the purpose of evening up the scale. These are the calls, or non-calls, that I think hurt the fans' trust in referees the most. These are the calls for which I feel the referees should be held accountable. To be fair, they probably already are. I'd expect the NHL to already have a system in place to evaluate the refs performance. But I think there has to be transparency in that regard to restore, to a certain degree, confidence in the league.
My suggestion is this: it would seem fairly simple to implement a review committee that would evaluate both the calls and non-calls made by refs and translate that into an accuracy% metric on a game-to-game basis. Over a large enough sample size, the fairer, better performing refs would naturally come out on top and these are the ones that should be favored for games played on the bigger stage, notably the playoffs. Implement a passing grade and those that fail to reach a certain accuracy % over a given sample size would simply have to be let go.
And make it public. Make it a stats page on NHL.com for everyone to see. Make individual game accuracy % ratings public as well. Give refs a game log with their stats just like players while you're at it.
Would that be a good or a bad thing? Is reffing even an issue that needs to be addressed in your mind or has it always been that way throughout all sports and we just have to deal with it?
