Toronto Maple Leafs: The Practice of Even-Up Calls Hurts NHL’s Integrity

The Toronto Maple Leafs desperately need the NHL to stop making even-up penalty calls.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have a great roster that is built on skill, and it makes sense that a skilled team should draw more penalties, and get more power-play opportunities, but in the NHL this never happens.

In the NHL there is a tendency towards even-up calls.  This doesn’t mean that every single penalty is even distributed, but I believe that there is a noticeable inclination by referees to split the penalties, and I think the data backs this up.

The Toronto Maple Leafs and the Even-Up Call

The Leafs are a team built on skill.  They have eschewed the traditional NHL team make-up, and do not have bruising defenders, power-forwards, or even a checking line.  Their starting six defenseman are all puck-moving, offense first players (even Jake Muzzin, who routinely has scored at a 40 point pace for his entire career).

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Given that the Leafs play a highly skilled, up-tempo style in which they focus on maintaining possession of the puck, you’d figure that their greatest strength would be drawing penalties and then destroying teams with their sick power-play.

In the NHL, however, there weirdly doesn’t seem to be any correlation between how many scoring chances a team tends to get, and how many penalties they draw. You assume that there would be, since the most reasonable cause for a penalty would be to prevent a goal. But it isn’t.

The reason is as simple as it is stupid: the NHL calls even-up penalties, constantly. It seems that taking penalties yourself is more likely to get you a power-play than trying to score a goal, or just having possession of the puck more often.

If team A takes multiple penalties, the NHL referees will most likely call team B for several infractions, whether or not they deserved them, in order to even up the power-plays.

Ironically, in trying not to overly affect games, NHL refs are basically incentivizing players to break the rules by limiting the consequences,  i.e the cost of taking a penalty is greatly reduced if you know that it will result in the other team eventually taking one as well.   The game has rules, and if one team won’t follow them, the other team should get an advantage.  The NHL basically makes itself lawless by making sure the penalties are evened up.

So who gets the most power plays?  In general, it is the team that takes the most penalties.  Who gest the least? The team that takes the least penalties.  (I mean it’s not exact, but more or less, this is the case).

Last year, half the league finished within a margin of 20 power play opportunities for and against.  Only two teams had a difference between power-plays given and received of more than 30, which seems statistically improbable unless even-up penalties are frequent. (All stats for this article from espn.com).

The reward for Columbus being the least penalized team in the NHL was one extra power-play for them that their opponents didn’t get, every four games.  The best power play doesn’t even score 25% of the time, so Columbus wasn’t even given an advantage of 1 goal every four games for being the best at following the rules, which certainly won’t incentivize anyone to follow them.

If this is the incentive, why should a team follow the rules at all? Why not prevent scoring by taking an absurd amount of penalties? You’ll almost certainly get enough power plays to make it a winning strategy.

This matters because even-up calls are taking away the skill factor out of the game and making them more random.  If a team is more skilled, it should draw more penalties and take advantage of it’s skill.  By basically giving worse teams a reason to not follow the rules, the NHL creates more parity and lowers the chances that the best team will win.  For a team like the Toronto Maple Leafs, this is clearly problematic, but it’s also an attack on the game’s integrity, regardless of who it helps.

Running the Numbers

Colorado has received the most power-plays in the NHL for three years in a row, an in fact, the correlation between taking a penalty and getting a power-play seems to be very strong.  Over the last three seasons, the teams with the most “times short-handed” are:

      1. Washington 771 2. Tampa 766   3. Nashville 763  4. Anaheim 758 and 5. Colorado 751

Compare that list to the list of teams who had the most “power-play opportunities” who are:

1. Colorado 823 2. Nashville 754 3. Tampa 749 4. Arizona 742 and 5. New Jersey 746

If the NHL doesn’t routinely employ the even-up call, then it’s pretty weird that three of the five most penalized teams over three seasons worth of games also were the three teams with the most power plays.

In the NHL, teams are not incentivized enough to play a clean game and avoid penalties.  If you take a penalty, you are almost assured of a power-play, so when in doubt it’s obviously going to be the “right” move to take a penalty if you think there’s even a slight chance it avoids a goal.

If referees just called the game as it happened, instead of trying to keep power-plays even, they should be willing to call ten, fifteen penalties in a game, in row, against the same team.  But that never, ever happens. I would be interested to know how many times over the last three years one team got even four power-plays in a row, in the same game. I would be willing to be a large sum of money that it happened less than would statistically probable.

Obviously an end to this practice would greatly benefit the Leafs, but I think it’s also self-evident, regardless of my inherent bias, that offering incentives to play a clean game is in everyone’s best interest (from the fans who will see more goals, to the players who will get injured less) and that it’s actually really dumb – if you think about it – that a team would be penalized for being too skilled or for following the rules.

The NHL needs to end the practice of even-up calls.