Officiating Recap San Jose Sharks Dec 23

The twelfth game I’ll detail in the officiating review recap is the San Jose Sharks game from Dec 23rd. A full summary of the findings up to the end of December can be found here.

The Oilers lost this game 3-2. The referees for this game were Kendrick Nicholson and Francois St. Laurent.

The most frequently targeted Oiler was once again Connor McDavid. The most truculent Oiler was Matt Hendricks.

The most bloodthirsty Shark player was Justin Braun who committed 5 uncalled infractions and served two penalties, a trip and a hold.

This was a penalty-filled affair, giving the impression it was a particularly dirty game. However, the rate of infractions was at or below the average number and instead I’m seeing that games involving Kendrick Nicholson are beginning to have a much higher rate of call. This isn’t to say that he is necessarily consistent, but he appears to be involved in games where the officiating crew are more willing to directly impact the game.

The Oilers committed just 9 uncalled infractions and received 6 penalties, all of them blatant or earned calls.

The Sharks committed 17 uncalled infractions and were penalized 8 times, predominantly for technical fouls such as tripping, hooking and holding.

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.