I was out of town for the long weekend so haven't been able to watch as much as I liked, though I tuned in for that brutal 3rd period last night. So I'm not sure exactly what to make of the reffing overall but I gotta say if you have a series where the games have been close 5 on 5 but one team has 3x the PP minutes than the other for no good reason, then yes the refs do become a factor/reason to your loss.
It's kind of like injuries. You hope your players can overcome it and try not to use it as an excuse, and sometimes that works, but most of the time it can and will become a factor that weighs down a team. Same thing with one-sided reffing, you try to persevere and kill off those penalties but there's only so much a team can take before they buckle under, especially when the margin for victory/defeat is so narrow.
But rather than some grand conspiracy (though I'm left suspicious from the Auger-gate incident) you have to consider that this is one of those 'when it rains it poors' things, and you don't want to discredit San Jose who've been playing really well. So you can't really say the reffing cost us the series, as that would imply the Sharks won because of it, but rather the more correct term would be the refs cost us a chance at winning the series.
