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How the new offside challenge rule will affect the Blue Jackets |
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The NHL has altered the rules for offside reviews. Starting this season if a coach requests a review for a play that was offside and the call on the ice is not overturned, the team will be assessed a two minute penalty.
This is a very interesting change and is definitely going to deter coaches from challenging close off-side plays. Last season there were 117 offside challenges and 78 (66.7%) of them were upheld.
Even if this rule was in place last year that’s only an extra 78 power plays across the league or 2.6 more per team. It might add a couple goals here or there, but the main there here is this will help keep the game moving. We saw coaches last season abuse the challenge system to an extent, challenging close offside plays to get an extended timeout for their team. We shouldn’t see that anymore. This new rule will ensure only the blatant offside plays (like the Matt Duchene goal from a few years back) are the only ones that get reviewed.
For the Jackets this new rule should really benefit them. I went through the NHL play by play data for each of their games last season and found that nine of their challenges were for offside reviews. Of those nine just two were overturned. John Tortorella and the Jackets coaching staff had seven failed offside challenges last year. That’s an extra seven penalties they would have had to kill off. The Jackets had a strong penalty kill last season at 82.51%, ninth in the league so maybe they would have been fine, but still even a couple extra goals allowed could be the difference between a win and loss.
Playing in the Metro points are going to be at a premium so any extra goals that can be prevented is a good thing. This new rule should prevent the Jackets from challenging close offside plays, an area where they were not very good last season.
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@PaulBerthelot
Columbus Blue Jackets Blogger • 
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