Officiating Review – SJS vs LAK games 4 and 5

In the last two articles I reviewed games 1 through 3 of the first round series between the Sharks and Kings. In this article we look over the final two games.
For reference, here is the introductory article that outlines the process I used during this exercise.

At this point in the series the Sharks led the Kings 2 games to 1 and had increased their share of the missed fouls in the series, which is to say that they had begun to play a game more akin to that of the Kings than their own style. Perhaps coincidentally both these games finished 2-1 with the teams splitting the results.

As before, we’ll begin by looking at the raw data from game 4.

Again, in order to try and remove as much bias as possible, I have removed the marginal infractions, called and uncalled, in the following tables and graphs.
First, the overall data from game 4.

The breakdown of missed and called fouls here looked markedly different than the first few games of the series with the Kings beginning to be penalized more often for their infractions while the Sharks seem to be increasing the frequency of uncalled infractions and simultaneously receiving fewer calls against them.
The technical fouls.

San Jose was assessed a marginal tripping call against Quick that was as much if not more diving than it was a trip, but in this instance the referees saw fit to call interference on goaltenders. However, while the Kings still held a considerable lead in committing uncalled technical fouls in this game the overall trend of the Sharks increasing their physical play in games continued as we shall see next.

Here are the physical fouls.

Both teams were equally guilty of physical infractions worthy of being called in this game, yet the Kings now were being penalized at a 3:1 rate relative to the Sharks. The Kings’ penalties were roughing and high-sticking while that of the Sharks’ was high-sticking.

What becomes clear here is that it took some hyper-aggressive behavior from Carter and Schenn to meet the officials’ threshold of roughing for a call and that the high-sticking infractions are a relatively (and I use that word specifically) consistently called infraction from the regular season to the post-season (more on that at a later date).

If I had to sum up this game it would be that the Sharks appeared to be getting some beneficial officiating and the Kings at long last appear to have fallen victim to the consequences of their style of game.

That this game finished 3-2 in another close results should not surprise us. Whether the Sharks attempted to match the Kings on a physical level or not, the result was nearly always close.

Game 5

Again, I’ll begin with the raw data.

Here is the overall data, minus the marginal infractions, from game 5.

It looks as though we have a return to the results from game 1 where the Kings played a relatively more aggressive game than the Sharks, only in this instance the two teams were not penalized at the same rate as they were in games 1 through 3. Some of this could likely be explained by saying that the Kings were facing elimination and therefore were going to play “closer to the edge”, but that doesn’t really hold water because the overall number of potential infractions by Los Angeles is half what it was in the first game at 15 to 30.

Let’s go a little further before we get too far into suggesting possible theories.

Here is the data on technical fouls.

It looks more like the trend we saw emerging in games 3 and 4 where the Sharks were as likely to commit fouls as the Kings and both teams are penalized for it. It should be noted that the sample size here is very small, and so claims like “the Kings were penalized twice as often as the Sharks” doesn’t really hold up.
So let’s move on to the physical fouls.

Again, we are dealing with very small sample sizes here, so we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions, but instead let’s look back at the raw data table at the top. The Kings committed high-sticking, boarding and roughing infractions in the space of ten minutes, only the last of which was called. Prior to that, at the end of the 2nd period, they had committed a run of boarding (marginal), roughing (marginal), roughing (obvious) and slashing (obvious/called).

So based on the timeline above, with regards to scoring I think we could argue that the Kings had pushed themselves back into the game and perhaps were operating under the impression that “leaning” on the Sharks would cause them to collapse.

The third period certainly held the greatest number of physical fouls in this game specifically, yet the score favoured the Sharks by a wide margin and no penalties were called.

Any argument that the officiating was a factor in this period alone would only serve to suggest that the Sharks might have led by an even greater margin.
Overall, in these two games what we appear to see is a kind of return the original state of the series, with the Sharks returning to a less aggressive style. There does not appear to be any correlation between their style of play and the score effects, though I’m not certain we could say the same about that of the Kings.

Next we’ll look at the entire series as a whole and break down the extent to which officiating had an impact on the series, whether there was any evidence of preference or bias, the existence of score effects, and so on.

Thanks for reading!