It’s time for players to decide games, not refs

It’s time for players to decide games, not refs:

The difference between referee pairings is what gets you,” says Ducks coach Randy Carlyle. “Some guys call everything to the letter, other guys will let them play a little bit. The little touches are often called as restraint and we as hockey people know they have no effect on the game, no effect on your ability to keep skating. But I don’t want to go back to the way the game used to be played either, because I’m telling you, the speed on the bench is greater than it’s ever been.”

Herein lies the disconnect between the players and coaches in the NHL and at least the more traditional spectators who watch their games.

The speed Carlyle describes is certainly not producing any more goals and often not a helluva lot more entertainment either, particularly if you happen to be watching in the West.

How you can get the kind of talent both San Jose and Detroit have in their lineups on the same ice and produce games with so little happening is nothing short of astounding, although that’s more the coaches’ fault than anything else

There’s a basic fallacy to this complaint. That is this: nobody should claim, at least with a straight face, that in the “good old days”, different referees all called things in a league-wide consistent way.

Think back to the days of the one referee system. Remember the time when in three consecutive games, Andy VanHellemond, Paul Stewart and Kerry Fraser came to town and called a game in your building.

Yeah, they all called the games the same way, right? Yeah, right.

No, this is a strawman argument. There IS inconsistency between referees and among referee pairs. There is, IMHO, a lot less than there was in the Good Old Days. But there’s a lot less of that than their used to be.

In fact, what this is is a two-fold complaint: dislike for the emphasis on obstruction fouls, and a fond memory of the “let the boys play” days, when the referees weren’t in fact allowed to referee the game, but were there merely to keep the players from killing each other. Mostly.

The reality is, the league is transitioning from being a league where rules were optional to one where the rules define the game, moving from the “pond hockey” mentality where two teams are fighting over who pays for the keg and it’s all okay unless an ambulance needs to be called, to a real, professional league like the NFL, where something that’s a penalty in the first period is a penalty in the last.

“let the boys play” is code for the good old days, and there’s an old-school group that remembers it fondly, and a new-school group that is seeing how once this transition is done, the game will be better, faster and more interesting.

The difference, by the way, isn’t THAT significant. It’s the difference between “do what it takes to win”, and “do what it takes to win — within the rules”. And one only needs to look at a guy like Chris Chelios to see how players can adapt — and adapt successfully — to the new reality. The high talent players will thrive in it, because they’ll be allowed to.

The new rules are about this league being a first-second line league, not a third-fourth line league.

Do the rules and interpretation need tweaking? yes. Does that mean going back to the Good Old Days to do it? no.

But for the league to succeed, the FIRST thing that needs to happen is for us to all get over the “let the boys play” mentality, because that’s the exact mentality that led to the days of the goon and the agitator, and the 1996 Panthers, which to me was the ultimate form of the monster created by “let the boys play”.

I’m working on some longer essays on this (I had to take a side-trip into doing some research to understand some things better; I realize that’s against the blogger’s rules where opinions matter, not informed ones, but nevermind).

But this is the key message: when “let the boys play” appears, the folks yearning for the Good Old Days are saying they want to go back to the days of the 1985 Oilers or the 1981 Islanders. And that’s a laudible goal (and it’s not coincidental that most of the folks calling for this were in the league at the time).

The problem is — that era died, and was replaced by the late 80′s and 90s — and ultimately the 1996 Panthers. It was killed by guys like Ryan Holliweg and Essa Tikkanen and Darius Kasparitis, and coaches like Scotty Bowman and Roger Neilsen and Lou Lamoriello, who understood that “let the boys play” gave them options that let them not have to out-skate Wayne and Mario, but merely grab on and pull those guys back to the pack.

The new rules are designed to force teams to get better, not merely prevent the other team from being better. And it’s working.

The problem (or perhaps “problem” is more appropriate) with scoring in the playoffs this year isn’t the new rules or the refereeing. It’s that the goaltending is do damn good. No offense to Grant Fuhr or Bernie Parent, but how would the 1981 islanders have fared against Roberto Luongo last night? AND HE LOST that series.

More on this, hopefully soon. But for now, realize this for what it is: a war for control of the game between two philosophical factions, those who want to go back to the “pond hockey” mentality (but refuse to understand that this is what lead to the 1996 Panthers), and those who are trying to move the game forward. The funny thing is, what the “let the boys play” group wants is not incompatible with where the league is trying to go. But they’re too involved with their fond remembrance of the Good Old Days to remember all of the bad stuff that went along with the parts they want to remember….

(*hat tip: kukla)

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