The problem for Tim Peel, in the end, was he said the quiet part out loud.
He acknowledged something that so many of us suspect: The National Hockey League’s officials look for even-up calls, even when they shouldn’t.
The league announced Wednesday that the veteran official, who was due to retire at the end of this season anyway, won’t be assigned any more games over the next six weeks because he got caught on air saying, during Tuesday’s telecast of a Nashville Predators vs. Detroit Red Wings game, that he was looking for a penalty even before he decided to whistle Nashville’s Viktor Arvidsson for a penalty.
However, the real story here shouldn’t be what Peel did, but about the culture around hockey’s referees, how they’re shown respect on the ice and also away from the rink by the people in charge.
Officiating any sport is hard. A game as fast as hockey is very hard.
Mistakes happen, calls get missed — that’s inevitable.
It’s worth noting how rugby union has had mics on its referees for years and doesn’t run into the same problems that the NHL seems to.
“Oh but those mics would pick up a whole lot more,” some have retorted. Yes, that’s the point.
Rugby players are just as capable at cursing as hockey players are.
Hockey may respect its officials, but there’s a real issue of how far that respect goes, both from players and coaches as well as from the leadership above.
Rugby officials have urged other sports that they would do well to turn the mics on all the time to help officials . Not only do hot mics help fans understand the game, they have a cooling effect on the players, too.
Hockey has managed to cool player behaviour in the past: Look at the crackdown on stick work and obstruction fouls in the 2005-06 season. That worked, as it ended clutch-and-grab hockey.
The game sped up. The velocity of the game now can partly be tied to that positive step taken that year.
Everyone seems to agree that officiating a hockey game is very hard. Usually that’s said to be because the game is fast, you have to make decisions quickly, adrenalin abounds and so forth.
People yell about game management, but few have been willing to point at the thing behind all this: What referees and linesmen are being told what to do.
What Tim Peel reminded us on Tuesday night was that referees have long been under pressure to manage the game. Managing the game is simply a reality. You can try to call as much as you can, but you’re still going to miss some stuff.
Managing the game is about conducting triage: What are the calls I can afford to miss and what are the ones I can’t afford to miss?
Done right, we would be able to tolerate game management. It’s when it feels more like game manipulation that people get upset — and rightly so.
“As a player you just hope they stick with (their calls), they stick by it,” Canucks defenceman Nate Schmidt said Wednesday of what he expects from officials.
“We just want consistency, no matter what it is,” Winnipeg’s Nate Thompson said when asked in similar terms.
Some nights, some teams are simply going to end up with more penalties than the other. That’s going to happen on the balance of the season, too.
And yes, the way the game is called during the regular season should be a lot closer to how it gets called in the playoffs.
Flip this one on its head: If Aaron Rome had hit Nathan Horton early in the 2010-11 NHL campaign instead of during that season’s Stanley Cup final, would he have gotten a four-game suspension for such an earlier transgression? Why should a suspension be heavier at one time of the season than another? Why shouldn’t penalties be called with the same kind of rigour, no matter the impact of the game?
A Stanley Cup final should feature the best hockey. Penalties should be called because we want to see the best hockey, not a brawl. Being afraid to make calls that might impact the game makes an impact on the game.
Remember, this isn’t the first time Peel has found himself in the news: In 2015, he gave an interview to Greg Wyshynski, then of Yahoo!, now of ESPN, where he said the league regularly told officials to emphasize certain calls over others .
He even said he had explained a call to a coach before, that it wasn’t necessarily a call he’d make if he hadn’t received a directive to look for those kinds of calls.
This is a league where video evidence of a referee engaging with a player and then the player accusing the referee of impropriety was essentially waved away, apparently not because of the weight of the evidence but because of reputation. (Isn’t it interesting how Stephane Auger managed to get in more trouble a year after Alex Burrows accused him of targeting him and was fired a year after that?)
The league executive responsible for that judgment was the same one who castigated Peel’s behaviour this week: Colin Campbell.
“There is no justification for his comments, no matter the context or his intention, and the National Hockey League will take any and all steps necessary to protect the integrity our game,” Campbell said in announcing the end of Peel’s career, a rich statement coming from someone someone who has been caught denigrating officials and players in emails to other league executives and celebrating on ice with his son after his team won the Stanley Cup … while still a league official.
Hockey can do so much better. Making an example of Tim Peel won’t do anything. The problem is bigger than that.
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