Oilers Officiating Review – Game 4

Game four of our ongoing officiating review is a March 28th game against the Ducks, a 2-1 loss for the Oilers.

Links to the previous articles will be listed below along with the raw data from this game.

The referees for the game were Marc Joanette and Justin St. Pierre. The most oft-targeted players were Matt Hendricks for the Oilers and Nate Thompson for the Ducks.

This game was a fairly busy affair in terms of infractions committed. There were seven penalties and nearly 60 infraction events, or what I term “missed calls”, with the vast majority (nearly 2 to 1) committed by the Ducks. Anaheim evened out the moderate or “fair” technical and physical fouls at 11 apiece and surprisingly seemed to focus more on technical fouls such as hooking, holding, and tripping than physical infractions.

Now the above information includes the marginal infractions, so in an effort to weed out bias I’m again going to narrow down our results to “fair” and “obvious” and then divide them into technical and physical fouls.

Once again we are looking at a situation where the penalties called are nearly even despite a significant discrepancy between the frequency of infraction events between the two teams.

Interestingly, if you look at the topmost table you’ll notice that neither team engaged much in what I would categorize as “obvious” or “blatant” physical fouls (this category includes boarding, high-sticking, cross-checking, spearing, and so on), but when the Ducks did they were penalized once with two other infractions going unpunished. Yet in the severity category below that, “fair” both teams were willing to engage physically and risk punishment, and although the Oilers committed only 5 unpunished fair physical infractions to the 11 by the Ducks, both teams received a single penalty in that category. This begs the question: did the Oilers leave unpunished physical infractions on the table, so to speak, out of concern they would be penalized or because of a lack of willingness to engage in that style of game?

Another interesting detail that comes to light in this analysis is that while Anaheim has a reputation of being a physically imposing team, taking the proverbial liberties and trying to push teams out of the rink by bullying them, here we see a greater emphasis by them on the technical fouls in this game, albeit by a relatively narrow margin of six events.

Overall this game continues the trend shown in the other games and we are beginning to collect some intriguing questions which I will re-post in the final article when we examine all the data from the Oilers’ games and compare it to our control group of non-Oilers games.

Questions? Feel free to post them below in the comments section or to me directly through twitter (@codexrex).

Thanks for reading.

Here again is the raw data.

Game one

Game two

Game three