Why is this team penalized so much every year?

[CanadianHockey]

Nice anlysis, SiverSeven. Logic would dictate that skilled, puck-posession teams who control the puck 60-70% of the game like OTT, DET, PIT would benefit on calls.

But reality states that since 1993, Canadian teams ALWAYS get the short end of the stick.

Out of fear of reiterating the unstated obvious which few realize:

Since 1993, Canadian teams are 0 for 20 in Cup wins despite having 7 of 24 teams in the NHL to the current state of 7 of 30 teams. Chance alone would dictate 5-6 Cup wins over this period.

Reality states the NHL has long pegged Canada as a market that will accept defeat yet still gladly
sell out buildings (for an extreme example, see Toronto). Hence the 20-year losing streak with NO MEDIA COVERAGE OR ANALYSIS.

Look at game 7 records for Canadian teams outside of crap-chute round 1. In 20 years, you will find 2 Canadian wins, one being Montreal in a dead-end win vs. Washington in 2009 when the NHL knew a loss to home-ice Pittsburgh in their dream PIT-DET 2008 rematch was imminent.

Canadian teams are actually 0-128 in Cup attempts since 1993. Nobody in the media dare to state these facts, as it will KILL ratings.

I'm sure the know-it-all regulars on here (who bully the informed off) will be quick to argue, heh.

Let's recap Canadian teams from the Bettman era onward, in order of importance to CBC:
TORONTO 0-20
MONTREAL 0-20
VANCOUVER 0-20
CALGARY 0-20
EDMONTON 0-20
OTTAWA 0-20
WINNIPEG 0-5
QUEBEC CITY 0-3 (won the Cup the first season of relocation in Colorado, and gained several years of sell-outs as a direct benefit of prudent Quebec drafting only to regress to half-empty buildings since two inherited Cups from Quebec and HOFers Forsberg/Sakic retiring)

Lack of Cup wins by Canadian franchises is not indicative of systemic favouritism by the NHL toward American franchises.

Furthermore, Cup wins over a 20 year span is a horrible way of measuring referee bias against specific teams.

Tl;dr - These anti-Canadian accusations are not grounded in reality.

 

[18Hossa]

Maybe all the refs grew up as leafs fans

 

[arglebargle]

^^^^
Like, half of the NHL refs are from Southern Ontario, so it's not a crazy idea

Referees really love the Maple Leafs. Kubina, Komisarek and Phaneuf all saw drops in the amount of minor penalties they got immediately upon joining the Leafs.

 

[Nac Mac Feegle]

Our guys tend to glide into the opposition alot. If you keep your feet moving, you generally don't get called for the hooking, holding and interference as much because it looks like you're hustling. It's all about perception.

 

[DrEasy]

Nice anlysis, SiverSeven. Logic would dictate that skilled, puck-posession teams who control the puck 60-70% of the game like OTT, DET, PIT would benefit on calls.

But reality states that since 1993, Canadian teams ALWAYS get the short end of the stick.

Out of fear of reiterating the unstated obvious which few realize:

Since 1993, Canadian teams are 0 for 20 in Cup wins despite having 7 of 24 teams in the NHL to the current state of 7 of 30 teams. Chance alone would dictate 5-6 Cup wins over this period.

Reality states the NHL has long pegged Canada as a market that will accept defeat yet still gladly
sell out buildings (for an extreme example, see Toronto). Hence the 20-year losing streak with NO MEDIA COVERAGE OR ANALYSIS.

Look at game 7 records for Canadian teams outside of crap-chute round 1. In 20 years, you will find 2 Canadian wins, one being Montreal in a dead-end win vs. Washington in 2009 when the NHL knew a loss to home-ice Pittsburgh in their dream PIT-DET 2008 rematch was imminent.

Canadian teams are actually 0-128 in Cup attempts since 1993. Nobody in the media dare to state these facts, as it will KILL ratings.

I'm sure the know-it-all regulars on here (who bully the informed off) will be quick to argue, heh.

Let's recap Canadian teams from the Bettman era onward, in order of importance to CBC:
TORONTO 0-20
MONTREAL 0-20
VANCOUVER 0-20
CALGARY 0-20
EDMONTON 0-20
OTTAWA 0-20
WINNIPEG 0-5
QUEBEC CITY 0-3 (won the Cup the first season of relocation in Colorado, and gained several years of sell-outs as a direct benefit of prudent Quebec drafting only to regress to half-empty buildings since two inherited Cups from Quebec and HOFers Forsberg/Sakic retiring)

If the NHL deems it more profitable that way, I wouldn't be too surprised if your conspiracy theory was correct. It's a business after all. That's a difference with the way leagues (eg., soccer) are run by *federations* in Europe and elsewhere, i.e. the federation is just there to organize a competition between clubs, and so it isn't there for the money (the money aspect is up to each club to worry about) and has nothing to gain or lose from a small-market team winning it all.

 

[Mephias]

Nice anlysis, SiverSeven. Logic would dictate that skilled, puck-posession teams who control the puck 60-70% of the game like OTT, DET, PIT would benefit on calls.

But reality states that since 1993, Canadian teams ALWAYS get the short end of the stick.

Out of fear of reiterating the unstated obvious which few realize:

Since 1993, Canadian teams are 0 for 20 in Cup wins despite having 7 of 24 teams in the NHL to the current state of 7 of 30 teams. Chance alone would dictate 5-6 Cup wins over this period.

Reality states the NHL has long pegged Canada as a market that will accept defeat yet still gladly
sell out buildings (for an extreme example, see Toronto). Hence the 20-year losing streak with NO MEDIA COVERAGE OR ANALYSIS.

Look at game 7 records for Canadian teams outside of crap-chute round 1. In 20 years, you will find 2 Canadian wins, one being Montreal in a dead-end win vs. Washington in 2009 when the NHL knew a loss to home-ice Pittsburgh in their dream PIT-DET 2008 rematch was imminent.

Canadian teams are actually 0-128 in Cup attempts since 1993. Nobody in the media dare to state these facts, as it will KILL ratings.

I'm sure the know-it-all regulars on here (who bully the informed off) will be quick to argue, heh.

Let's recap Canadian teams from the Bettman era onward, in order of importance to CBC:
TORONTO 0-20
MONTREAL 0-20
VANCOUVER 0-20
CALGARY 0-20
EDMONTON 0-20
OTTAWA 0-20
WINNIPEG 0-5
QUEBEC CITY 0-3 (won the Cup the first season of relocation in Colorado, and gained several years of sell-outs as a direct benefit of prudent Quebec drafting only to regress to half-empty buildings since two inherited Cups from Quebec and HOFers Forsberg/Sakic retiring)

I think it's a lot less a consequence of a conspiracy and a lot more a consequence of the fact that 3 Canadian teams are in a single division and 3 others are in another division. That alone makes it hard for all of the Canadian teams to even make the playoffs in any given year.

As well, you're ignoring the gross mismanagement of some of these teams in recent years. Edmonton has been a joke, Burke has run Toronto into the ground, and the same could be said for Sutter in Calgary. Vancouver had some very strange years in the 90s where they screwed around with Messier and ran Bure out of town.

And despite everything I just mentioned, don't forget that 4 Canadian teams have made the Stanley Cup Finals since 2004.

Tl;dr NHL conspiracy is BS. Now, the NBA on the other hand...

 

[BonkTastic]

I wanted to say that we must have angered a lot of refs during the Corey Clouston/ Jarkko Ruutu era (for good reason, those two probably did more to damage our reps with refs for the next decade), but we started getting disproportionately more penalties called against us the year BEFORE they both came to Ottawa, so it can't be that.

Though, and this is purely a gut call: I don't think either of them helped our case with officials.

All that being said: we've had a lot of guys on our team who have either had or developed reputations with refs that have made them a target for phantom calls based on reputation since 2008: Ruutu, Foligno, Neil, Carkner, Smith, Konopka, Lessard (sigh)... hasn't helped our rep at all.

Also: we're small market, with few (if any) "marketable stars" who are able to get away with a call here and there based on notoriety (in a positive sense). That's not to say we don't have stars on our team: we clearly do. It's just that we're a small enough market that we're never going to have the league anxious to really put one of our guys over in a marketing sense. We'll always be the sleepy Canadian town where guys fly under the radar. Guys like Crosby (and many others) tend to get away with more, because they have more leeway based on their rep.

And, as many others have pointed out: we've been a "tough team to play against" the past 4+ years. When you play that style, you tend to draw more penalties against you.

 

[Dr.Sens(e)]

A couple of factors, from where I sit:

First off, this primarily due to puck possession, as referenced by Stigs.

Despite having a relatively skilled team over the last 5-6 years, we have not been a good puck possession team - no where near the team we had in the mid-90's. The skill has not been very deep on the forward lines, and a lot of this starts with skill and puck handling on the back-end, and also the systems in place. MacLean is no doubt putting in a decent system, but post-Jacques, we have lost our puck possession style, and also lost a lot of the discipline Jacques demanded. As unimaginitive as he was at times, in particularly adjusting mid-playoff series, Martin was a terrific at putting in a solid discinplined system, and we had a ton of talent to make the puck possession part of it work. We also didn't have as much toughness, other than guys who play 4 minutes a game every other game when necessary.

The second factor has been the types of players the team has started to put in place. And Murray has definitely been part of this. He likes a tougher and bigger team, that impose themselves physically on teams. He has tried to transform this team by adding a different breed of player than we had back in the day, and many of these types take more penalities than they draw.

Many years ago, our 3rd and 4th line had the likes of Vermette, Kelly, McCammond, Eaves and Schaefer. Not totally soft, but more skill and speed on the bottom 6 than we have even today (we're getting better). And our D had toughness from the likes of Chara and Volchenkov (who were tough, but didn't take bad penalties).

In recent years, our forward lines have added guys like Ruutu, Foligno, Smith and a few others that tend to be more physical, but also take a lot of bad penalties (those three in particular). On D, we used guys like Carkner and Sutton on a regular basis, who didn't handle the puck as well as Chara and A-Train, and also took a lot more bad penalties trying to impose themselves.

I think the disparity this year is more of a blip though - at least I hope so. MacLean is putting in place a decent puck possession game, so I suspect this trend will start to reverse itself. But it has been a major achilles for us, as we used to get a ton more PP's than the opposition.

 

[Micklebot]

I wanted to say that we must have angered a lot of refs during the Corey Clouston/ Jarkko Ruutu era (for good reason, those two probably did more to damage our reps with refs for the next decade), but we started getting disproportionately more penalties called against us the year BEFORE they both came to Ottawa, so it can't be that.

Though, and this is purely a gut call: I don't think either of them helped our case with officials.

All that being said: we've had a lot of guys on our team who have either had or developed reputations with refs that have made them a target for phantom calls based on reputation since 2008: Ruutu, Foligno, Neil, Carkner, Smith, Konopka, Lessard (sigh)... hasn't helped our rep at all.

Also: we're small market, with few (if any) "marketable stars" who are able to get away with a call here and there based on notoriety (in a positive sense). That's not to say we don't have stars on our team: we clearly do. It's just that we're a small enough market that we're never going to have the league anxious to really put one of our guys over in a marketing sense. We'll always be the sleepy Canadian town where guys fly under the radar. Guys like Crosby (and many others) tend to get away with more, because they have more leeway based on their rep.

And, as many others have pointed out: we've been a "tough team to play against" the past 4+ years. When you play that style, you tend to draw more penalties against you.

Don't forget that our quiet fans have a hard time "intimidating" the refs like some other franchises. Don't think this has a huge effect, but it all adds up.

 

[miser]

Bottom line is that our style of defensive play has a lot to do with it. That, coupled with having younger players, means it adds up quick.
Younger players make more mistakes and also haven't developed the credibility with the officials to get the benefit of the doubt - whenever there is any.

 

[ErikKarlsson]

Bottom line is that our style of defensive play has a lot to do with it. That, coupled with having younger players, means it adds up quick.
Younger players make more mistakes and also haven't developed the credibility with the officials to get the benefit of the doubt - whenever there is any.

Bottom line is no that is not the reason, look at the stats, it goes a lot further back then the current roster.

 

[ChocolateLeclaire]

Don't forget that our quiet fans have a hard time "intimidating" the refs like some other franchises. Don't think this has a huge effect, but it all adds up.

We're not that quiet...

In fact, After Game 6 in last year's playoffs (where phantom calls led to a Rangers win), the two bozos working that game had to be escorted out of the arena by police as there were about 200 fans waiting outside for them...

 

[OgieO]

Players have changed, coaches have changed, systems have changed, penalty disadvantage has not.

It's probably a variety of factors. For two years we've heard whispers that refs say we complain too much (sounds like we have a reason), I also think part of it is the perception of our team (i.e. we're not the top dogs in terms of star power) and the refs are human and thus imperfect - which allows these factors to affect their decisions on the ice.

 

[CanadianHockey]

Let's not forget that last season, refs told MacLean that Karlsson is a diver.

 

[Micklebot]

We're not that quiet...

In fact, After Game 6 in last year's playoffs (where phantom calls led to a Rangers win), the two bozos working that game had to be escorted out of the arena by police as there were about 200 fans waiting outside for them...

In the extreem cases we react. But for the run of the mill stuff we don't. Some teams fans (i'm looking at you Philly) will boo the refs out of the arena on a perfectly legit call. We're so used to getting the short end of the stick it takes a major incident to get us rilled up. Also, playoffs are a completely different beast so far as fans go.

 

[18Hossa]

The arena was pretty loud last when we took a penalty or when they didn't get called on one.

 

[SilverSeven]

Bottom line is that our style of defensive play has a lot to do with it. That, coupled with having younger players, means it adds up quick.
Younger players make more mistakes and also haven't developed the credibility with the officials to get the benefit of the doubt - whenever there is any.

That doesnt explain anything. 2 seasons ago we had far fewer younger players and played a completely different style. 4 years ago it was a completely different style that the next two.

Style, coaches, players have all changed, yet we are still penalized more than almost anyone.

I wonder how players PIM change when they come to/leave this team.

 

[SilverSeven]

A couple of factors, from where I sit:

First off, this primarily due to puck possession, as referenced by Stigs.

Despite having a relatively skilled team over the last 5-6 years, we have not been a good puck possession team - no where near the team we had in the mid-90's. The skill has not been very deep on the forward lines, and a lot of this starts with skill and puck handling on the back-end, and also the systems in place. MacLean is no doubt putting in a decent system, but post-Jacques, we have lost our puck possession style, and also lost a lot of the discipline Jacques demanded. As unimaginitive as he was at times, in particularly adjusting mid-playoff series, Martin was a terrific at putting in a solid discinplined system, and we had a ton of talent to make the puck possession part of it work. We also didn't have as much toughness, other than guys who play 4 minutes a game every other game when necessary.

The second factor has been the types of players the team has started to put in place. And Murray has definitely been part of this. He likes a tougher and bigger team, that impose themselves physically on teams. He has tried to transform this team by adding a different breed of player than we had back in the day, and many of these types take more penalities than they draw.

Many years ago, our 3rd and 4th line had the likes of Vermette, Kelly, McCammond, Eaves and Schaefer. Not totally soft, but more skill and speed on the bottom 6 than we have even today (we're getting better). And our D had toughness from the likes of Chara and Volchenkov (who were tough, but didn't take bad penalties).

In recent years, our forward lines have added guys like Ruutu, Foligno, Smith and a few others that tend to be more physical, but also take a lot of bad penalties (those three in particular). On D, we used guys like Carkner and Sutton on a regular basis, who didn't handle the puck as well as Chara and A-Train, and also took a lot more bad penalties trying to impose themselves.

I think the disparity this year is more of a blip though - at least I hope so. MacLean is putting in place a decent puck possession game, so I suspect this trend will start to reverse itself. But it has been a major achilles for us, as we used to get a ton more PP's than the opposition.

Theres a bit of revisionist history going on here. When Chara was here he was penalized for any moderately big hit. Automatic elbow. Volchenkov also was penalized a fair bit. And A-Train handled the puck like it was a live grenade.

 

[Dr.Sens(e)]

Theres a bit of revisionist history going on here. When Chara was here he was penalized for any moderately big hit. Automatic elbow. Volchenkov also was penalized a fair bit. And A-Train handled the puck like it was a live grenade.

True of Chara early on after he arrived, but by the mid-90's his penalties has drastically been reduced. A lot of that had to do with reputation.

And if Volchenkov handled the puck like a live grenade (nice one), can you give me a comparable metaphor on the same scale for Sutton and Carkner? <shudder>

Does behindthenet cover back to the mid-90's? If so, it would be interesting to compare penalties drawn to penalties taken.

As I noted, the main reason was we were a much better puck possession team. But I do believe having likes of Carkner, Sutton, Ruutu, Foligno, Smith and others take a regular shift was also part of it, albeit less of one.

The one theory I don't buy into at all, is that that refs are out to get us in some way. this is akin to the boogyman theory. Hometown fan paranoia suffered league wide.

 

[SilverSeven]

The refs dont have to be out to get us, they can merely suffer from an unconscious bias. I dont think they are conspiring before the game about how to screw us over.

Look at the Leafs stats. They dont play a puck possession game, spend far more time in their end, and half of the players on their team in that time have been glorified goons.

 

[Beville]

You do know we have Chris Neil on our team, right?

And that last season, we had Neil AND Konopka?

 

[SilverSeven]

You do know we have Chris Neil on our team, right?

And that last season, we had Neil AND Konopka?

I must have forgotten that everyone else in the league is Pavel Datsyuk.

 

[Dr.Sens(e)]

The refs dont have to be out to get us, they can merely suffer from an unconscious bias. I dont think they are conspiring before the game about how to screw us over.

The unconscious bias theory is even more far fetched - if anything, it would swing the other way. It's not like there is this underlying belief deep down amongst refs we're the Big Bad Senators. We aren't talking about the Raiders of the NHL, here. Quite the opposite, I'd say.

 

[Micklebot]

True of Chara early on after he arrived, but by the mid-90's his penalties has drastically been reduced. A lot of that had to do with reputation.

Wut? His Penalties were 100+ just about every season until his third in Boston in 08/09. He only started playing in the late 90's (97/98) and arrived in Ottawa in 2001.

 

[Micklebot]

The unconscious bias theory is even more far fetched - if anything, it would swing the other way. It's not like there is this underlying belief deep down amongst refs we're the Big Bad Senators. We aren't talking about the Raiders of the NHL, here. Quite the opposite, I'd say.

All in all, I think the penalty conspiracy isn't a reality but bias can be from any number things, not just some belief that we're the big bad sens as you said. It could just be that they don't like the team (grew up Leafs fan for example), or don't like the coach (Clouston), or any number of things.