Paul Stewart: Officiating and the Sheet Cake Effect

Honestly you have an admirable outlook when you were a ref. Unfortunately the current league clearly isn’t like this. Fans will always trash officiating especially when it’s going against their team. But in recent years the number of incidents of media, teams, coaches and players criticizing officiating has increased significantly. I get the league doesn’t do officials any favors with a vague rule book, wanting to not disrupt game flow, protecting league darlings, or even just calling things to even things up or keep a team in the game. Honestly I might look at this example through red tinted glasses but the Canes are a perfect example of a team that dominates possession and skates circles around their opponents relatively consistently but they’re constantly on the wrong side of penalty differential the past 3 years. They’ve also been fined at a high clip for making comments about the officiating. Travis Yost even wrote an article about it recently. Like I said good for you for making every game a clean sheet, but quite frankly you’d have to be blind to watch half an NHL season for just about any team and not see the problems of the current system.

Paul, were there certain players who you gave more leniency to or gave the benefit of the doubt to based on personal interactions?

Interesting read, Paul! Can you elaborate a bit on this excerpt if you don’t mind?

In reality, officials have as much accountability as players do. Everyone has a boss.

Thanks!

Have to say the real issue has been started by going to the two ref system. The effect was almost immediate with a need for more refs that resulted in unready refs being moved up the levels. This in recent years has been exacerbated by older refs retiring.

Add in the whole "game management" that has become absolutely ingrained, where refs are worried about as you put in #3 the "flow of the game" and this is where we have issues every game night in and night out. Forget managing things and call the rule book. It has little to do with who likes who. If it does those refs need to be accountable and dealt with because they are there to simply call the rules of the game. If this results at first in teams taking a slew of penalties guess what? They'll learn real fast. Happens every time the league mandates a focus on a certain rule. It gets hammered then dies down and at that point things just revert to how it was.

The league needs to clean it up in all honesty but it starts with ditching this manage the flow/manage the game mentality. It has to go.