Oilers Officiating Review – Game 1

Near the end of the regular season I began to wonder about how we might measure whether the Oilers were getting their fair share of penalty calls. Fans had been bemoaning what appeared to be fairly lackluster officiating for some time and I had spoken to a few observers who said that it appeared to them to be some of the worst refereeing they could recall watching.

But here’s the problem, how do we know what is the griping of the fans from another lost season and what would actually constitute a reasonable grievance?

So I set out to test this idea. I decided to record and report on every remaining Oilers’ game (unfortunately there were only ten) and look for corresponding non-Edmonton games to act as a kind of control against which I could compare results. It took three games for me to refine my method for collecting the data, so in the end I had only seven Oilers games and seven non-Oiler games.

Disclaimer – I acknowledge and confirm that 7 games is an almost negligible window of data from which to draw any conclusions. I also realize that for many, this small a sample size would outright discredit the entire exercise. All that being said, I hope this will prove enough to at least act as a starting point, a sounding line so to speak, by which we might begin to survey the obscured landscape of NHL officiating. As such, my approach in this exercise isn’t going to be specifically a statistical one, but rather something akin to a sociological perspective using empirical data to corroborate or disprove fan observations.

During the course of this exercise I was pointed in the direction of two articles relative directly to this topic. The first by JLikens, from 2010, discusses the score effects related to penalty calls and discovers that teams are more likely to receive calls in their favour when trailing than when ahead. The second by Noah Davis and Michael Lopez from FiveThirtyEight, written in May 2015, discusses referee bias and the propensity of officials to try to “even up” the calls for teams.

So it would appear that referees have an admitted bias to try to even up penalties in a game and that teams that are behind are more likely to be the beneficiaries of further referee bias. But how do those two arguments mesh with what we see with regards to the Oilers?

Here’s what I did, I watched every played minute of every game in question, often rewinding and replaying events as many as a dozen times or more to determine whether an infraction had occurred and then recording whether it was called or uncalled (missed), the severity of it (1 for marginal, 2 for fair, 3 for egregious) and whether it was a technical foul (hooking, interference, tripping, etc) or physical (elbowing, boarding, roughing, cross-checking, etc), the player against whom the foul was committed, and the time at which it occurred.

I didn’t review the games until sometimes as much as a week had passed in order to try and minimize any emotional reactions in the reporting and I spent as much time reviewing, looking even, for missed infractions committed by the Oilers.

At the bottom of every article I’m going to post all the raw data in case anyone wants to check the work, and we’ll go game-by-game until we reach the end. At which point we’ll have a look at what we’ve got for the Oilers versus the rest of the league games I recorded.

The first game we’re going to look at is the San Jose game on March 24th, a 6-3 win by Edmonton.

For those interested, the most-often targeted players for each team in this game were Draisaitl and Eberle for the Oilers and Joe Thornton, Tommy Wingels, and Michael Haley (who?) of the Sharks.

Below is a table and graph showing the number of infractions, both called and uncalled, relative to the two teams. Pay particular attention to the penalties each team took compared to the number of uncalled infractions.

Here’s a summarized version.

(I apologize for the blurry images, please click on them to enlarge)

You’ll see that both teams were penalized more or less evenly (the Oilers took one more penalty than the Sharks), yet the Sharks appear to have been committing fouls at a rate of just under twice that of the Oilers.

Now, to try and further eliminate any bias I may have had in gathering the data, I re-evaluated it all by removing all of the level 1 fouls, you’ll recall these are the minor infractions like a little tug on the jersey or even a soft cross-check (in so far as that is possible). I realize this was a rather crude method of reducing bias, but it seemed the most effective and even-handed way to go about it and would likely remove the more emotionally reactive incidents from my record.

The following tables and graphs look at level 2 and level 3 (Fair and Obvious) infractions separated into the technical and physical fouls.

The most glaring thing here at first glance is probably the sheer volume of uncalled technical fouls committed by the Sharks when compared to the number of penalties called. However, consider that the Oilers committed several as well, though far fewer, and were not penalized for any. I will call this “rate of call”, meaning the likelihood of an infraction being called relative to not being called.

The physical infractions comparison is the more telling about the nature of NHL officiating as a whole, and one I would advise you to keep in mind as we move into future games. The reason? While it is a fairly small sample size (only ten missed calls in total) the ratio shows an even number of penalties despite an obviously lopsided ratio of fouls committed.

Referees will tend to try to find a balance in the number of penalties called in a game, outside of a few circumstances, despite the actions of either team. This isn’t really new, but it does help to illustrate a point that may have otherwise remained undiscussed – what does it mean about the integrity of the game when teams receive equal powerplay time but commit infractions, some of them potentially injurious, at wildly different frequencies?

Consider this: if a team knows that they are going to be penalized roughly as often as their competitors, why not simply use every effort to bully and intimidate them, committing virtually every foul at your disposal shy of putting your opponent on a stretcher, knowing that if you do get penalized you are at least reasonably likely to get a “make-up call” at some point in the game?

At least in the Oiler games I have recorded, this does appear to be general theme of the opposition.

I will be posting new articles on this subject every Tuesday and Thursday morning in July. I welcome any comments or questions you might have on this project, either in the comments section or on twitter (@codexrex).

Here’s the raw data (I apologize in advance for the wall of text).

(Legend: Ft – Fighting, HK – Hooking, Tr – Tripping, CC – Cross-checking, Bd – Boarding, R – Roughing, Un – Unsportsmanlike, Int – Interference, Hs – High-sticking, Hd – Holding, S – Slashing, Dv – Diving, GI – Goaltender Interference, M – Misconduct, DG – Delay of Game, BM – Bench Minor)