Toronto Maple Leafs: The NHL Needs to Enforce Its Own Rules

The Toronto Maple Leafs won their season debut on Wednesday, but the cost could have been high.

The Toronto Maple Leafs best player, Auston Matthews had an absolutely fantastic start to the season. Even though the best player to ever wear the blue and white was held without a goal for the first time ever in a season opening, he  played an incredibly impressive game.

Matthews’ line posted a 73% possession rating, had many high quality chances (including Matthews ringing the potential winning goal off the post) and had over 80% of the total scoring chances when they played. (stats naturalstattrick.com).

It was a great game, but there was just one problem: Matthews was noticeably hurt heading into overtime, and the reason stems from several brutal and blatant cross-checks to the back at the end of the game and throughout the night.

The NHL Makes No Sense

Long criticized for putting profits ahead of safety, the NHL has taken commendable (though perhaps not drastic enough) steps to remove fighting and headshots from their game.  Yet despite a move towards making the game safer, the NHL still allows an incredible amount of leeway for players who use their sticks as weapons.

In the NHL, even though hitting another player with your stick is supposed to be illegal, for some reason if a player is standing in front of your goalie, it is OK to smash him in the back with your stick almost as much as you want.

A fun experiment if you live with someone who doesn’t watch hockey is to get them to join you for a game and try to guess what constitutes a penalty.  The results are guaranteed to be hilarious.

In last night’s game, Matthews took a ton of uncalled abuse while standing outside the goalie crease and without the puck.  A referee so inclined could have called cross checking, roughing, unsportsmanlike conduct or even interference.

With four good options to choose from, the referees decided to ignore two consecutive blatant, dangerous infractions (against one of the few people in the NHL who actually sells tickets and whose continued healthy is in everyone involved’s best interest).

To understand why there wasn’t a call is impossible.  Perhaps it is because the NHL (wrongly) believes that if it calls every infraction that the game will be an unwatchable parade to the penalty box.  Since they could increase the punishments for breaking rules as they see fit, and thus incentivize players to follow them, this reasoning is ridiculous.

The NHL also evens penalties up, meaning that one team rarely gets a disproportionate chance at the power-play over another, and that penalties are  almost completely arbitrary.

The NHL players should have an incentive to follow the rules, but in fact teams that break them the most tend to be rewarded by the attempt to even up the calls, and thus the game is far more dangerous than it should, or has to be.

The indisputable fact is that in the NHL you almost have to commit murder to get a penalty call heading in to overtime. The Canadiens should haver been given two minor penalties as time expired, but the irony is that if that had, the Canadiens would have had a legitimate complaint because they’d want to know why those were called for the first time ever against them.

The NHL needs to do better by its players and its fans.