or: How the NHL’s Feel Good Story of the Year Became an Embarrassment to the League

Capitals 2, Flyers 3 (OT)

The Capitals first playoff series in five years, along with the team’s most exciting season in a decade, came to an unceremonious end at Verizon Center last night as Joffrey Lupul tucked a rebound behind Caps goaltender Cristobal Huet to win the game, and the series, for his Flyers.

This series held so much potential for the NHL: a matchup of past Patrick Division rivals, the league’s most exciting player in Alex Ovechkin, most improved teams in the Caps and Flyers, the feel-good story of the year and even the “good versus evil” angle pitched as the plucky comeback kids battled the reincarnation of the Broad Street Bullies. Yet the story of this series was officiating from Game 1 until Game 7 and ultimately played an undeniable role in the series’ outcome.

Capitals fans will be upset about the Flyers’ second goal last night’s game and rightfully so: it was an embarrassingly bad missed interference call on the part of the referees. But it’s not as if this were the only bad call (or non-call) and it’s not as if the poor officiating never benefited the Capitals; to insist otherwise would be sour grapes. But between the non-calls on the Flyers who goaltender interference throughout the series, the bad call for goalie interference by Viktor Kozlov, a missed double-minor high stick by Nicklas Backstrom on Mike Richards, the officials not noticing the puck going out of play in last night’s game and too many missed interference calls to count (it’s illegal to set a pick in the NHL now, shouldn’t referees know that?), the NHL came across as a league unable to drag competent officials out even for a playoff series.* The result: what could have been a shining moment for the league instead became an embarrassment, the only saving grace being the hope that the casual fans the NHL would have been appealing to in this series don’t know enough about the game to realize how much of an impact the referees had.

As much of a right as Capitals fans have to complain the problem here goes well beyond this game and this team - with how closely this series was contested and the repeated poor officiating, it’s impossible to say how things would have played out if the referees had done well, and it’s certainly no guarantee that the Capitals would have won.

The larger issue is a league-wide one. The NHL is doing a pretty good job of crawling its way back towards respectability in the major sports world: ratings on Versus and NBC are up, attendance appears to be up, Sidney Crosby and Ovechkin are true “crossover” stars, the league’s Winter Classic was well received and many nontraditional markets are being revitalized. But many long-term fans have noticed the deteriorating officiating over the last couple seasons, a problem which seems to getting worse almost every game. It seems strange, but the problem of the NHL’s rapid expansion might not be spreading the hockey talent too thin but rather in coming up with enough people to adequately officiate these games.

*It’s also worth noting that, excluding automatic penalties like high sticking and puck-over-the-glass and matching roughing, slashing and fighting calls, the officials called 27 first period penalties, 20 second period penalties and 13 third period penalties. Sure there’s bound to be some discrepancy but fewer than half the number of calls in the third than in the first? That’s a clear example of referees putting their whistles away. While that approach has it’s proponents, the fact is that a penalty in the game’s first minute should also be a penalty in its last minute.