Follow @james_tanner123 With all due respect to my boss here at the 'buzz, Eklund, I have to disagree with his take on the NHL's amendment to the offsides rules. Unfortunately I already had written most of this before seeing the boss's take.
The NHL is going to now penalize a team for an incorrect offside challenge. Eklund's concern is that this is going to lead to less challenges and more goals counting that technically shouldn't.
I agree 100% and that is why this new rule is great.
To understand why, you need to recognize the difference between the spirit of the law, and the rule of the law. Yes, technically 10/1000s of an inch offside is still offside. However, the spirit of the rule is to prevent gross cheating across the line in order to gain an advantage, not to punish people for minor infractions that don't effect the game.
The reviews were put in place to avoid goals like this:
But everything has an opportunity cost, and when you want 100% call accuracy (or something approaching that) the trade off is an inordinate amount of time spent pouring over calls that no one is going to complain about if they go either way.
For instance, a team losing because of the above goal has a legitimate complaint. But if you lose 3-2 and your main complaint is an offside call that couldn't be differentiated with the naked eye, you're just being a sore loser.
There is no need for 100% accuracy. As long as you get the blatant offsides called back, I think we can live whatever the ref or linesmen decide in real time, and by making it a penalty to throw a hail Mary challenge on a fractional, microscopic offside, the NHL will restore the integrity and spirit of the rule.
Hours and hours will be saved. Games will be faster. And 97% of the calls will be correct.
They still haven't addressed the problem of how long you can call back a play after an offside occurs. I don't think we've seen this yet, but what if the Leafs are offside, come in, hit the post with a goal that would have been waived off if it went in, then the Habs come down and score. Can Toronto challenge their own offside? Can they say that if the ref did his job properly and called them offside, that the Canadiens wouldn't have scored?
Anyways, it looks like the NHL has at least mitigated the worst part of the offside reviews and made some progress. I'd prefer they take all video review out of the game, and sign a pledge to never allow robot refs, but that is just me.