In defence of subjectivity on NHL goal reviews

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That’s the expression attributed to an array of thinkers from generations past, and it comes up a lot given the message contains real truth.

It crossed my mind when thinking back to the nightmare that was the NHL’s “skate in the crease” reviews from my teenage years. I couldn’t help but notice it was included in a recent piece by Sean McIndoe that reminded people just how bad the “skate in the crease” rule used to be for hockey fans.

I’m writing this as an appeal to regular viewers of the game because please, for the love of God, stop clamouring for a rule change you’ll regret.

During those years you’d regularly see a goal scored at the side of the net, then a ref would say “well actually” and video review would show that a hint of a breath of a whiff of someone’s skate had touched the blue paint on the complete other side of the crease from where the puck went in, and the goal was waved off.

Skate positions that had nothing to do with otherwise excellent hockey plays caused a frustration far more justified than these current debates over the impact of unquestioned contact with goalies.

Is that the kind of “clarity” people want because sometimes they disagree with a few subjective calls?

“Nobody understands the rule” is a thing upset players, coaches and managers have said in the media enough when they didn’t like a call that went against them that now a captive audience of fans has grabbed on to it and formed some kind of movement about “fixing” goalie interference rules. “See, even the players don’t get it,” goes the appeal to authority.

Here's the thing: those players and coaches understand it just fine. Sometimes they purposely misunderstand it, and sometimes a call gets made that they blatantly disagree with, but on the whole they understand that if you contact a goalie in the blue paint around the time the puck is being shot in, it ain’t gonna count.

If it makes those disingenuous players feel better, maybe they should pretend it’s the old-fashioned skate-in-the-crease rule: never go in the paint and they’ll never have this problem.

Due to hockey’s unique combination of speed and aggression and its free-flowing nature, it’s the hardest sport in the world to officiate. What makes it doubly hard is that with the introduction of instant replay, we can now freeze and zoom and slow down individual frames to second guess all calls, stretching a moment that happened in a tenth of a second to ten seconds.

That latter fact originally made many think “Hey maybe video review is perfect for a sport so hard to officiate." But I’ve since come to better understand that what we’re really trying to do is let the players decide the outcomes, while using video to eliminate the more obvious mis-calls refs happened to make in real time.

What I think players and fans need to do to better understand which way a call is going to go is to view contact with a goaltender the same way they may have during the “skate in the crease” era. If in fact there was contact with the goaltender in the blue paint – like when there was a skate in the crease – prepare for the goal to be called off. In fact, it will be called off every time in those instances, except when that contact came as a result of the defensive player driving the offensive player into their own goalie, or when the contact happens early enough that the goalie can re-set and continue playing their position.

If the contact happens outside the crease, well, the goal will stand. That one’s on the goalie.

All that said, let’s flip back to the point about hockey's speed and aggression: even when following those basic tenets, it can be really hard to determine if a goalie was “out of the crease” or right on the line. It can be tough to tell if a player went into the goalie by being incautious, or was pushed in. We’re going to have calls that people disagree about.

But on the margins, getting 'X' number of those calls “wrong” (by someone’s subjective standards) is far better than overturning bushels of goals because of some errant skate-blade that had quite literally no effect on a goal being scored. Wiping off legitimately good goals for the “clarity” of a loud minority of fans would be asinine.

Yes, the increase in video reviews is slowing down the game, and worse, it’s sapping momentum right as goals are scored, when the buildings are rocking and the storylines are starting to take shape.

I know the NHL immediately reviews plays as they happen, and I would encourage more of that so they’re prepared with an answer – not with the replays, but with their actual opinion of what should be called – by the time the refs go to the phones.

And further to that, if a call on the ice was made and it’s not immediately something that can be overturned by the video review room, I’d be fine with capping the number of replays officials can watch on a play in the regular season.

An on-ice look and three re-watches should get us to the correct answer 90-plus per cent of the time, so if we’re OK with a few blemishes along the way, we need to keep NHL regular season games going. In the playoffs, fine, let them watch more reviews and get it right, entertainment might not be the first priority there.

But even then, we still just have to live with the idea of subjectivity in how hockey is officiated because of the nature of the game. Some days it can be hard to look at NHL refs and say “they’ll figure it out,” but going back to the skate in the crease rule isn’t close to a good solution.

If people who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, we’ve got one thing going for us here: this toe-in-the-crease “history” wasn’t that long ago, and many of us did learn how bad it was.

There’s one other expression that’s relevant when it comes to goal reviews, and we shouldn’t forget that one either: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

It definitely isn’t perfect, but for hockey, it’s good enough.