Toronto Maple Leafs: The NHL Needs to Address Officiating Problems

The Toronto Maple Leafs are into their second straight week of having a strangely long time between games (considering the condensed nature of this year’s NHL schedule) but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a ton of stuff to talk about.

The NHL trade deadline is approaching and just about every player in the NHL has been linked to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Additionally, the first games in the Canadian Division were postponed due to Covid after the rest of the league had over 30 postponed to date.  This seemed to be inevitable but it still sucks.

The main news, however, is that notoriously unpopular referee Tim Peel was caught talking about wanting to give the Nashville Predators a penalty, and subsequently “fired,” but not really.

Let’s dig into it.

Tim Peel Retires Early

During last night’s Predators game Tim Peel was heard saying this on the broadcast:

"It wasn’t much, but I wanted to get a f***** penalty against Nashville early in the.."

Subsequently, the NHL made him retire a month early.

Now, obviously the NHL has to act here, but what is so frustrating is that Peel is just a scapegoat for the league’s own incompetency and stupidity.

Whether or not the NHL refs are actually instructed to keep the number of penalties in a game even or not, the indisputable fact is that they do.   The laws of statically probability suggest that if the games were just called as they should be, we’d often see games where one team took a drastically different amount of penalties than the other team, but we rarely do.

You rarely even see the same team take three or more penalties in a row. Once a team takes multiple consecutive penalties, they basically have free range to do all but the most blatantly illegal things.

This impacts the game in so many ways, but the biggest one is that it incentivizes teams to make illegal plays.  For instance, why would any team attempt to follow the rules when taking penalties prevents goals against while almost guaranteeing you an even number of powerplays?

It really makes no sense to play a clean game because the incentive to play dirty is incredible.  Take the Leafs – they built a skilled team that rarely takes penalties and they suffer for it, while the opposite should be true.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are 25th in the NHL in time per game spent on the PK.  They also happen to be 25th in time spent on the power play.

Now, this is just one season, and the sample size is small, so let’s dig deeper.,

In the three seasons preceding this one, the Leafs were (once again) 25th in time spent per game on the PK.  They are dead last in time spent on the PP – over a minute less per game than the 30th ranked team.

This is outrageous.  Clearly, the refs look at the Leafs high powered power play and do not want to decide the game by letting them loose.  But this still has a huge effect on the game, and the Leafs end up penalized for following the rules by having their greatest strength neutralized.  Couple that with the tendency to even-up the calls, and the officiating screws the Leafs in two different ways.

This is a Leafs-centric site. We are obviously biased towards the Leafs, but that shouldn’t discount obvious facts and problems.  Tim Peel was fired for just saying out loud what everyone who has ever cared about the NHL knows happens every single game.,