As NHL Expands Video Review, How Can It Strike A Balance Between Accuracy and Speed?

The offside that wiped out a Zach Hyman goal in a January contest between the Edmonton Oilers and Chicago Blackhawks wasn’t a matter of a foot but the smallest fraction of an inch.

From where Connor McDavid was sitting, the entire situation – the review, the time it took to rule on the offside, and the resulting no-goal call – felt farcical. 

“If it takes you 15 minutes to determine if it’s offside or not, it probably doesn’t matter,” McDavid said. “I talked to the linesman after. Ultimately, it’s not their call, I guess. Obviously, they said it came down from the league. You zoom in, you zoom in, you keep zooming in until you can’t zoom in anymore, and I guess it’s offside.”

If McDavid is displeased with the almost Zapruder-esque state of the various replay reviews in the NHL, though, he’s not about to get any happier. In March, at their annual meeting, NHL GMs voted to expand the scope of the coach’s challenge – which currently allows for review of offside, goaltender interference and missed stoppages – to include puck-over-glass and high-sticking penalties, for the sake of rescinding the infractions. The proposed changes passed through the NHL/NHLPA competition committee and the board of governors in June to officially amend the rulebook.

The concern from those who sympathize with McDavid’s stance is that broadening challengeable plays will lead to an increase in video reviews, and particularly those of an especially forensic nature. With that comes the fear of longer stoppages, less flow in play and an altogether less exciting product. But Colin Campbell, the NHL’s senior executive VP of hockey operations, takes umbrage with such anxieties.

Speaking with reporters at the March meetings following the proposal of expanded review (and after refuting McDavid’s assertion about the length of that specific January review: “It didn’t take us 15 minutes,” he said. “It took us four minutes and 15 seconds.”), Campbell specified he believes the current system is working and will continue to work with the new additions. 

“We try to make the right call,” he said. “We try to get as many of the right views as we can with technology, and it seems to be improving constantly. It might linger for five or six minutes in that game, but if you get the wrong call, it could linger for five or six weeks or longer.”

There is merit to Campbell’s assertion that sacrifices need to be made for the sake of accuracy. Ask a Calgary Flames fan about the 2004 Stanley Cup final or, to use a more contemporary example, a Vegas Golden Knights fan about the phantom five-minute major that preceded one of the most stunning collapses in playoff history in 2019. (Since this issue has a ’90s bent, we could point to the infamous Wayne Gretzky high stick on Doug Gilmour to placate the unrelenting Toronto Maple Leafs faithful, but that play wouldn’t have been reviewable under modern rules.)

But if the way to mitigate these circumstances is to expand review, the NHL’s challenge is to make accurate decisions while finding the balance between quantity, quality and efficiency. It should be acknowledged the league, for whatever missteps it has made in implementing the coach’s challenge since its introduction in 2015-16, has done well to reduce the frequency of challenges.

Consider that, per morehockeystats.com, there were more than 260 coach-initiated reviews in each of the first four seasons after the challenge was introduced. The majority of those were failed challenges: success rates varied from 27.9 to 39.6 percent from 2015-16 to 2018-19, which speaks to the trivial nature of challenges in those seasons. In 2017-18, to combat those frivolous reviews, the league instituted a delay-of-game penalty for failed offside challenges. It produced immediate results. There were 293 challenges in 2017-18, down from a record 381 the season prior. And the NHL’s continued efforts to tweak and tune its rulebook to reduce the number of challenges has worked. This past season saw 232 challenges, the fewest in the nine years since their introduction, and the per-game rate has been in decline over the past six seasons.

Far more difficult to address, however, is arriving at the right decisions quickly, though perhaps there are ways in which the NHL could rely on technology to get there – and they can draw on an event such as the 2022 FIFA World Cup as a test case. 

This is an excerpt from Jared Clinton's feature story in The Hockey News' Top 90 Of The 90s issue, which put the spotlight on the NHL's efforts to improve its video review process.

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