WCHA Officiating Is Intolerable
On Saturday I promoted a blog post by Goon where he showed how the WCHA officials absolutely failed in a dirty hit that led to the injury of last years WCHA Defensive Player of the Year. This year Chay Gennoway could contend for the most valuable player award (The prestigious Hoby Baker Award). Because of that teams are looking to play him physically. On Friday night a player crossed the line and Gennoway may have a concussion that could keep him out for weeks. The senior official on the ice watched the entire play and didn’t make a call. While the trainer was attending Gennoway they had a conference and assessed a penalty to the wrong player.
Clearly you’d expect the officials to do a better job on Saturday night. If you did, then you’d be wrong.
During the first period the Sioux scored a goal that was disallowed. The officials through the public address system told us it was because the whistle had blown. At the time we knew it hadn’t. The replay confirms that.
Right before the puck goes in you can see it in front of the goalies right pad. (On this video it looks like a shadow, but the stands behind the goalie are darker than the playing surface so it is the puck.) The whistle never blew until the puck was in the back of the net.
I guess the official claimed at the time that the goal doesn’t count because he “intended” to stop play when he couldn’t see the puck. NCAA rules do allow that, but that shouldn’t apply in this point. I can see the rule applying in the case where the puck is legitimately frozen by the goalie. You don’t want to reward the other team for hacking on the goalies hands. Or I can see this rule being necessary if the referee is tripped up and can’t blow the whistle when they need to.
On the other hand if the referee had blown the whistle it would have been a mistake. The puck wasn’t frozen. Now it does happen often because when the referee can’t see the puck they have to assume that it may be frozen and they stop play to protect the players. And a goal after the whistle has to be disallowed because you have to assume that a player might have been able to stop it, but they quit as soon as the whistle blew.
In this case the play shouldn’t have been stopped. It wasn’t stopped. We scored a goal. That goal should count.
You can see that the referee had the whistle in his mouth a long time before the goal was scored. If he really wanted to stop the play he could have. As bad as his interpretation of the rules is, the fact that he didn’t blow the whistle before he did makes him out to be a liar.
What’s particularly galling is that on Friday night the shoe was on the other foot. This same referee had a longer time to blow the whistle and never did. The opposing team scored and this official counted it. Friday night it didn’t matter much. We still won by two goals. Saturday night the one goal he took away was the margin of victory for the opposing game.
The two officials that the WCHA sent to officiate this game this weekend, Don Adam and Tim Walsh, should be fired. Adam’s got an history of allowing Sioux players to get badly injured. Walsh comes off as entirely incompetent.
