Most penalties should be 1 minute minors

[TheOtherOne]

Here's the thing: You propose two major changes, the first focused on shortening the length of time a team is shorthanded during a minor, and the second designed to encourage officials to call infractions more often.

History teaches us time and again that the officials start out calling everything after a crackdown campaign starts and then they slowly revert to letting it slide. Why? Are they simply dicks? Incompetent? Bias?!?! Is it Bettman? No, of course not to all of the above. The owners decide how the game is called and the owners might periodically grumble about calls, but they always pull back whenever there is a tightening of the way the officials call the game. The officials, the league office, and the commissioner are all ultimately just implementing the wishes of their boss(es), which are the NHL ownership cadres. Owners don't like it when the game is brought to a crawl by penalties.

So you have one change that will slowly fade away, while the other is a fixed, measurable, and comparatively immutable change. As the officials stop calling as many penalties, it's not like you will see the length of time that teams are on the PK decline in a graduated manner to match it. Any quick change again to two minutes would be an admission they screwed up, so it would be years before they could save face and go back to two minutes for a minor.

So you'll have fewer and fewer minors called, but they'll all still only be for one minute apiece. The result is that you'll get fewer goals. Some may be fine with that, but the league generally wants to encourage scoring.

I don't foresee anything "slowly fading away" as you argue. On the contrary I think the new standard will cement itself as more sustainable, more fair, and more enforceable.

I think the biggest problem with the inconsistency right now is this: Calling a penalty is seen as too harsh in a lot of cases.

Like we all know a little casual hook is illegal. Even if it doesn't substantially affect the play. Even if nothing comes of it. Every single time a stick ends up in an opponent's midsection for a fraction of a second, it is against the letter of the law and can be legitimately called a power play.

Of course many times it is let go. I'm absolutely sure that refs often see something they could call, but they feel it's unnecessary to interrupt the flow of the game. They see that something is illegal but they don't feel it was illegal enough to justify giving the other team a 20% chance at a goal.

So the number one main goal of lessening the punishment from 2 minutes to 1; from 20% chance at a goal to 10% (or whatever the chance ends up working out to); is to take that burden away from the ref, allowing them to call every thing they see in a much more black and white way. Don't worry about if it was an important hook or not. Don't worry if it really affected the play. Don't worry about game management or flow. You see a penalty, you call it.

Refs will still get it wrong sometimes. They are human. That's fine. But for one single individual call, that becomes less important. It's just a 1 minute pp, no big deal.

But if a team continues to hook, over and over and over, the ref can keep calling it, over and over and over, and the result is a substantial advantage to the team that generally keeps things legal.

And if the end result is consistency, to the point where teams are avoiding illegal plays more often, leading to fewer penalties and fewer PP minutes, then I think that is a big win too. The best hockey in my opinion is when both teams are following the rules and playing a lot of even strength hockey.

 

[SA16]

Bad idea. One minute penalties would be too easy to kill and likely cause teams to just intentionally break the rules more often because the threat of the PP is severely limited.

 

[TheOtherOne]

Here's a different way to think about it. I don't know if this will help or hurt my case but I think it's at least an interesting line of thought.

1 penalty in hockey results in a PP for 3.3% of the game (generally).
1 penalty in basketball is worth 2 free throws, which on average is about 1.5 points, which is about 1.5% of the final score. (I'm not looking up these numbers, just ballparking, please correct if it's way off).
So comparing to basketball you could argue that a penalty call in basketball is less than half as important as a penalty call in hockey.

Of course there is a lot of handwaving here. A single goal is much more important in hockey. But you can also argue that 2 minutes of scorelessness (even if you don't get your PPG) can be extremely important in a hockey game.

But in the long run I think a takeaway is that penalty calls happen a lot more often in basketball, and it's rarer that a single call ends up being anywhere near as controversial as a call in hockey.

I almost want to delete this. I don't even watch basketball so I'm totally talking out of my ass here. But I guess it's not really going to hurt, if you guys want to talk about how dumb it is go ahead.

 

[txpd]

This is easy. No. Just no. If a penalty is just 1 minute, players are goiug to think its open season for elbows and high sticking. no.

Edit: The average pp% is 20%. Cut the pp in half and its down to around 10%. Add that the near disappearance of the 5 on 3 as a thing. No thanks

 

[TheDawnOfANewTage]

I appreciate the thinking, but- no. It might fix some things, but it brings its own problems- # of whistles/pace of play, and the complete disappearance of 5-on-3s.

Refs just need to ref better. More consistently, and I’d argue with more interference and cross checking calls. If you wanna eliminate a penalty, the puck over the glass thing doesn’t need to be 2 minutes.