Opinion: NHL Officials Are Only Human, But They Should Explain Their Calls
NHL officials aren't out to get your favorite team, and there's no island of completely perfect referees. But Adam Proteau agrees with the Bruins' GM about accountability.
It’s a(n often-imagined) tale as old as time – sports officials are out to get your favorite team.
Every year, for one reason or another, a group of fans will swear up and down that referees are somehow determined to give the opposition an advantage.
But the truth is less conspiratorial: referees are only human and, thus, inherently subjective and occasionally flawed. And the outrage is so predictable that the only question is which fans will take umbrage when calls don’t go their way.
The NHL experiences this issue every post-season. With every play under a microscope, NHL officials are hyper-analyzed and criticized. While this writer is of the opinion you can never make everybody happy with the state of officiating, the league definitely could be embracing more scrutiny for the people weaning stripes.
To that end, the Boston Bruins and their fans are angry at some of the liberties that appear to have been taken by their second-round opponents, the Florida Panthers.
But to his credit, Bruins GM Don Sweeney chose to take a different path to ensuring the game is called on the up-and-up: making referees much more accountable to the public.
Sweeney answered a question on Monday about media interactions with his coach, Jim Montgomery, when Sweeney suggested the media should turn its attention elsewhere.
“The overall premise I have, to be perfectly honest with you, is we should not be asking the coach after the game what they feel about the officiating and what happens,” Sweeney said. “You (media) should really be focused on what we didn’t do well enough in the course of the game to win a hockey game. Those questions should either be directed at either the supervisor of officials, supervisor of the series and/or the officials.
“You want full access and transparency? Then put the officials in front of the microphone to answer the question.”
Hear, hear. Those are all fair comments by Sweeney – certainly, nothing worth fining him for. He’s made a logical request, and indeed, it’s high time the NHL made a representative of the officials available to media.
We don’t need everybody to question each and every referee after games, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong to ask for greater accountability from the people interpreting the rulebook. And having one official answer questions from, say, a pool reporter, isn’t an awful lot to ask.
The league and officials might push back hard on this request, but they should see it as an opportunity to educate the press and fan bases and limit far-out theories. The NHL already takes that approach with its Department of Player Safety. And while we can easily see that measure still doesn’t make everyone satisfied with all of the league’s decisions, at the very least, it would send a message to the referees that they do have to answer to the public to some degree.
If the NHL doesn’t want to go that far, they have nothing to complain about when the public discourse boils over with notions of conspiracy. Nobody is asking for the league to humiliate officials who’ve made an error in judgment. Rather, it’s about acknowledging that mistakes are made and owning up to them when they do take place or explaining why a decision was made.
The NBA now does this. The NFL also has more scrutiny when it comes to blown calls. Why can't the NHL?
As we’ve said many times before, there’s no island of perfect referees for the NHL to tap into to call their games. The increased speed of hockey makes it harder to officiate than ever before. But that shouldn’t shield referees from taking 10 minutes after the game to explain their thinking on crucial playing sequences.
High-definition TV and slow-motion technology might make any fan believe they can do what officials do, but veteran observers know better than that. And that’s why officials should be confident enough to explain their rationale for high-impact calls on the ice. Like them or not, they’re the best we’ve got, and whinging ad nauseum doesn’t do anyone any good.