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Ever since the NHL adopted the coach's challenge system, I have been critical of its flawed design and short-sighted implementation. However, when the league does something right, I think it deserves commendation.
Entering the third season of the coach's challenge, the league has finally taken one needed step in getting back closer to the spirit of the game's offside rules as well as the one-timeout-per-team rule. All along, I have felt it's legitimate to have a mechanism to correct a missed offside call that ends up in a goal. However, that mechanism needed to be a delay of game penalty, not a lost timeout, for an unsuccessful challenge.
Too often, challenges with little to no chance at successful overturn of the on-ice call have been used more as a stalling tactic than a legitimate beef with a puck entry or keep at the blueline. Implementing a delay of game penalty removes that tactic. This is the same reason why a challenge for an illegal stick curve (which is a virtually non-existent tactic nowadays) exists.
Secondly, the number of challenges for splitting-hairs offside plays (was a skate on or a half inch over or off the blueline as the puck entirely crossed?) will also be reduced via the delay of game penalty. The spirit of the offside rule is to prevent an unfair advantage to the attacking team. Now, many of these seemingly endless delays over fractionally different onside/offside plays will be eliminated by the delay of game penalty risk. The more blatantly missed offside calls that periodically contribute to a goal will still be challenged, and that is fine.
I'm still not a big fan of being able to back-time an offside challenge on a sequence where the offside/onside play happened well before the actual goal, but I understand the reasoning behind it. Overall, the NHL made the right call here.
However, common sense still eludes many other aspects of the coach's challenge system. One corrective step has been taken, but others are needed.
The lost-timeout rule still exists for challenging goaltender interference. It should probably a uniform system -- challenge if you want and more than once if needed, but at the same delay of game penalty risk.
A bigger issue, which I've harped on many times over the years: Rule 69 (goaltender interference) is an utter mess in how it is written, how its dozens of permutations are instructed to be called and in how it is consequently often implemented in self-contradictory or counter-intuitive way. The NHL needs to get a committee of hockey people together, including players, coaches AND people with on-ice officiating experience (who always get excluded from such important discussions) to reconsider and rewrite the approach to Rule 69. We then need to better coach our officials on applying it.
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.