Oilers Officiating Review – Game 3

Today we look at the third game in our ongoing officiating review series.

The game below is from March 22nd, against the Coyotes, a 4-2 win for Arizona.

You can find the first game as well as my introduction of the exercise here. Game two is here.

As usual, we’ll begin with a general overview of the infractions, both called and uncalled, broken down into the categories of physical and technical and sorted by severity. Referees for this game were Tim Peel and Kyle Rehman and the most targeted players for each team were Ryan Nugent-Hopkins for the Oilers and Sergei Plotnikov of the Coyotes.

Going into this project I don’t know that I would have singled Arizona out as a team that would have this noticeable a difference in uncalled infractions. Certainly Oilers fans have been decrying every one of Shane Doan’s sins, be they real or perceived, for years. And perhaps as much as we could point to the discrepancy between the uncalled infractions for the Coyotes to those of the Oilers, we should focus precisely on those of the Oilers, as this marks one of the lowest uncalled infraction totals the Oilers will score through this project. This teases at the question which will form itself more fully as we proceed: ought the Oilers to engage in a more contentious style of play, willfully breaking rules, under the assumption that in either case penalties will be doled out at a relatively even pace regardless of how often infractions are committed?

Let’s take a look at this data again, but without the marginal (level 1) infractions included, and see what this can tell us about the nature of the game, how the Coyotes played it, and also about the Oilers.

The number of uncalled technical infractions committed by the Oilers drops significantly relative to those by the Coyotes. In other words, where the Oilers were committing about 1/3rd of the total uncalled infractions before, when we narrow it down to technical calls that aren’t marginal it drops to half of even that, or about 1 of every 7. If I had to guess, I’d say this is what fans or coaches refer to when they use the term “compete factor”.

However, we could also frame this as:: because of the officials’ noted predilection for evening up the penalties, the Oilers essentially took a penalty on every third infraction committed at a “fair” to “obvious” level of severity (including one penalty called on a marginal infraction which is listed in the topmost chart) compared to the Coyotes being penalized for every fifth infraction committed at the same level and none of them for physical infractions.

If we are to assume, based on anecdotal evidence and statements from former referees like Kerry Fraser (links are in the original article, but you can find it here as well), that they aim to even up the number of penalties in a given game regardless of the number of infractions committed, presumably because they feel that those infractions will be committed at roughly an even pace by both teams, then we are beginning to piece together an argument that this approach is fundamentally flawed as it provides the appearance of fairness but allows for rampant exploitation of the system to the detriment of one team.

We are three games into our exercise and I think a trend is beginning to emerge. What do you see?

Comments and questions are always welcome, either in the comments section below, or via twitter (@codexrex).

Thanks for reading.

Raw Data