Oilers Officiating Review – Game 6

The sixth game in our officiating review is the final game at Rexall, the April 6th match against the visiting Canucks. A convincing, and cathartic, 6-2 win for the good guys.

Referees for that evening were Tom Kowal and Jake Brenk. The most targeted players for either team were Ryan Nugent-Hopkins for the Oilers and Derek Dorsett of the Canucks.

Links to the previous games are posted at the bottom along with the raw data from this game.

This game had some extra drama to it as the Oilers had just received a public lashing at the hands of the Flames and it was the final game at Rexall Place/Northlands Coliseum.

You may recall that some of the trends and officiating guidelines that we had been working on previously seemed to be overturned in that Flames game, with the officiating record coming out with some decidedly peculiar, if not outright biased, decisions. Would things improve in the follow-up game? Only marginally.

The referees returned to the old standard of making sure the penalties in the game were more or less even, if only on paper.

The Oilers committed just over half as many uncalled infractions as the Canucks, and both teams were penalized relatively aggressively for physical fouls with the technical ones less heavily enforced. That being said, we are near the end of the exercise and have arrived at the point where we consider a game where the opposing team commits twice as many uncalled infractions as being something akin to a tie or moral victory. I would suggest that this speaks to the state of our expectations on officiating and fair gamesmanship in the NHL.

Here again I have refined the data to focus purely on fair and obvious infractions and then divided them into the technical and physical categories for further study.

I think we’ve arrived at the point where we have to begin to look at the columns in the tables below and ask ourselves “what is fair?” Is fair an even distribution in the “Called” columns, or in the “Missed” columns? Given that a powerplay goal can have a significant impact on the outcome of a game, allowing a team a lead, a tie, or cutting a deficit, is it reasonable to suggest that powerplays hold greater importance within the overall game structure than uncalled penalties, or unrealized powerplays? As such, should on-ice officials operate under a mandate that emphasises in equal measure they are to mete out powerplays as well as punishment? Does this place officials as the gatekeepers of sorts to a game-defining position that is perhaps at odds with the best interests of the game? In other words, is it better in the long run that games be considered fair by the measure of both teams having equal opportunity with a man-advantage than that games be measured as fair by way of both teams being held accountable to the rules and structures of the game as a whole?

Within the context of this exercise, there were not a great number of missed infractions in this game. In fact, one could argue that based on the rest of the data collected thus far, 12 penalties in a game with this few uncalled infractions represents something of a crack-down by the officials. That being said, the discrepancy between called and uncalled infractions in a game like this begins to become galling when held in direct contrast to each other.

We have one more game remaining in our officiating review before the final article which will examine our entire data set of Oilers’ games versus a control group of games from other NHL teams.

What are your expectations regarding how the other teams break down in the categories of called vs uncalled infractions?

Raw data.

Game one

Game two

Game three

Game four

Game five