In case you haven’t noticed when I’m not dealing with something at work, doing something with my kids, wife, or friends I tend to eat, sleep, and breath hockey. One of the things I have heard five times in two days in the idea of handing the coach of an NHL team the ability to challenge a call during a game in the same manner that an NFL coach would. The latest was on Hockey This Morning on XM Home Ice which means it is near the NHL mainstream at this point.
Its a terrible idea. The reason for the discussion in the first place has been a string of bad/missed goal calls by the Toronto War room or the on ice officials in the past few weeks. One such miss sparked a controversy over inappropriate conduct at FSN-Pittsburgh during the December 7th home loss to the Flyers. You will remember that Simone Gagne had a goal disallowed and then as soon as play resumed the television audience was shown an angle that proved it to be a goal. Thankfully that goal did not alter the final score but it did underline a problem in the NHL’s replay and review system. FSN was ultimately forced to indefinitely suspend producer Lowell MacDonald over the matter.
Let me say this loud and clear. This answer is not to put a yellow flag in the coach’s pocket or a yellow flashing light with a switch at the bench so that the coach can second guess the officials. If there is any room for a challenge it is in one place: goal calls. Before this insanity gains much momentum the conversation needs to be limited to challenges to determine if the puck fully crossed the red line and should be counted as an official goal, nothing else.
If it isn’t you will find a pack of people advocating that the coach should be able to request review of a 2 minute high stick for blood and turn it into a four minute penalty. You will see challenges on hooks, slashes, highsticks and roughing. It could get as ridiculous as challenges to faceoff positions, delay of game and even offsides calls. We do not need the game of hockey to get bogged down in the ridiculousness that is the NFL replay process. Wasting 2-5 minutes for an official to go under the booth to determine if the ball should be moved 6 inches forwards was demonstrated to be a crowd killer in the NFC Championship. Doing it to hockey would be even worse. Drama is built on speed and the fluid nature of play in the game.
3 Low and a High Goal cam per end. NHL needs to pony up.
The NHL is a league trying to capitalize on the speed of the game. Its frenetic pace has been made more exciting and yes dangerous since the removal of the two-line offside pass after the lockout. Allowing coaches to challenge anything other than a goal call would be a reversal on the league’s desire to keep the game up tempo. So lets consider the only thing that even remotely comes close to making sense, goal calls.
How many does the coach get per game, One? If so, what the penalty if he challenges wrongly? He loses the only team timeout he gets? The real solution lay somewhere else. The once lauded War Room in Toronto needs to remove it’s dependency on the local network feeds (or NBC/Vs). The Achilles heel exposed in the Gagne goal was that one tech booth for FSN-Pittsburgh made the determination not to send a video to Toronto either actively or passively and that decision or omission resulted in a goal not being credited properly. If the NHL would put its own cameras in the arenas for the overhead of each goal plus the rear low and front low angles (8 feeds) there would be no discussion occurring on challenges. If they got fancy they could do it with 3 cameras.
The only obstacle is cost. Personally I think they can use the money they didn’t donate to Hatian Relief efforts to at least get the ball rolling. Quips aside the NHL needs direct control over their own video and not an agreement with biased local coverage providers to ensure the integrity of the game. Once they have that the call for a coach’s challenge will go away.
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