Officiating Recap Los Angeles Kings Dec 29

The thirteenth game I’ll detail in the officiating review recap is the Los Angeles Kings game from Dec 29th. A full summary of the findings up to the end of December can be found here.

The Oilers won this game 2-1. The referees for this game were Kendrick Nicholson and Francois St. Laurent.

The most frequently targeted Oilers were Connor McDavid and Eric Gryba. The most truculent Oiler was Brandon Davidson.

The most craven Kings player was Alec Martinez who committed 4 uncalled infractions, 2 interference infractions, a hooking infraction and a slash. He was not penalized during the course of the game.

I’ve reviewed several Kings’ games now between this season and the end of last season. Typically they are not enjoyable. In most cases there is a long list of uncalled infractions as the Kings’ have well earned their reputation for a particular playing style.

This game is something of an anomaly. There were very few infractions even by typical game standards. The Kings’ number of uncalled infractions still greatly outnumbered those by the Oilers, but by and large this was a game contested by hockey means rather than brute force.

The Oilers committed just 10 uncalled infractions and received 2 penalties, both of them blatant or earned calls.

The Kings committed 22 uncalled infractions and were penalized twice, one an earned technical infraction, the other a phantom tripping call on Matt Hendricks.

Here are some visualizations of the data and game state.

Below is a graph of the relative rates of infractions committed versus those called. For this data set I removed weak uncalled infractions to help weed out bias and noise.

Below is a table that displays the game progression as it relates to infractions committed and penalties called.

Here is the raw data.