If you weren’t paying attention to the larger sports picture last week, you may have missed the significant changes two prominent pro sports leagues made to their product.
The first was MLB’s decision to finally employ video review of balls and strikes calls. The second was the CFL’s move to radically alter the dimensions of their playing surface and the changes to their goal-post locations.
“Tradition Meets Innovation” was how the CFL painted its changes. That was a smart way to put it, because all leagues absolutely should be using technology and thinking outside the box when it comes to changing the way they provide entertainment. This is why the NHL needs to be equally brave when it comes to changing the way its game functions.
For a while now, we’ve argued that the NHL should be employing a third referee – an off-ice official who serves as an “eye-in-the-sky” referee who can buzz down to the two on-ice referees and get a stoppage in play to make a call the two on-ice refs have missed.
Yes, it would be a significant change for the NHL, but the decisions made by the MLB and CFL are equally huge, if not even more so.
When you change the size of your playing field, you’re making a big move. When you use video replay to challenge balls and strikes, you’re making a big move. But there’s only one real question you should be asking – does this move lead to a fairer, more entertaining game? Clearly, the CFL and MLB believe that’s the case. A system that leads to fewer missed calls is absolutely a system the NHL should be employing.
Anyone who’s watched an NHL game in recent years knows the action has gotten nearly impossibly quick, and the two-referee system can’t help but miss out on a penalty call or get it wrong here and there.
But at a time when parity has never been greater, one or two blown calls can decide how a game or series plays out.
So while it might feel foreign at first to see an on-ice sequence stopped out of nowhere, if an eye-in-the-sky referee makes a call, they’d do so knowing the call will be watched and re-watched over and over again. It’s paramount they get the call right. But if we’re giving the off-ice referee final say in calls – and that’s the idea here, so as not to have endless delays and debate waiting for calls to be finalized – then we have to be assured the off-ice referee knows what they’re doing.
But the bottom line isn’t about the particulars of a three-referee, eye-in-the-sky official to be added to the mix. The bottom line is that calls are being made that would have otherwise been missed. That’s what MLB is doing with its new video replay rule changes. And that’s a noble reason for the NHL to reconsider its officiating system.
The whole idea is that no team or fan base should be able to point to a blown call as the reason their team didn’t succeed. (Of course, we’ll never get to 100 percent satisfaction with every call that’s made, but that’s something we should aspire to nonetheless.)
How would this type of change come about? Well, the NHL would have to run it by the competition committee and the Board of Governors, but the league has shown in the past it can pass any change it likes in short order, depending on the urgency behind it. For full proof, search up “the Sean Avery Rule” and see for yourself the speed at which the league can change a rule when it really wants to.
In any case, we will continue to discuss the three-referee system, as we believe it has value. If we accept the officials as human-and-therefore-flawed actors in this sports business, finding a way to cover off some of the calls they’ll inevitably miss is what they should be doing all the time, over and over, until they get close to total success in that regard.
Remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that the NHL had only a one-referee system. Can you imagine all the calls they’d have missed if they stubbornly stuck to their one-ref system because of hollow notions of “tradition?” The mind truly boggles at the thought.
So yeah, the NHL should follow the lead of the CFL and MLB and do what’s within its power to change the game for the better. A static league is not always a successful one, and the NHL needs to bear that in mind when the notion of change arises again.
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