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Bad Replay Angles Can Deceive |
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Follow Paul on Twitter: @paulstewart22
Video and photography are valuable supplementary tools for on-the-scene officiating but will never be an acceptable substitute for it. There are times when replay angles are deceptive.
Last night's Game 7 in Pittsburgh between the ultimately victorious Penguins and the Ottawa Senators is a perfect case in point. Crashing the net in overtime, Phil Kessel knocked the puck upwards, where it skittered ON TOP of the net across the crossbar and netting before landing in the crease.
Immediately and correctly, the official waved "no goal" and play continued. Pretty easy call from his vantage point, actually.
Ah, but enter the home arena replay folks. They showed a replay from one angle and one angle only, which gave the optical illusion of the puck being in the net. Now, the Pittsburgh crowd was all riled up, booing. Some of the more brain-dead "fans" littered the ice.
To me, this was deliberate deception geared ONLY toward riling up the crowd. It had nothing to do with actual replay procedures, which involve looking at multiple angles to find a definitive one. In this case, that was not hard to find. The puck being on top of the net was so clear-cut, in fact, that it made the Penguins-employed "game presentation" folks look like jackasses to TV viewers across the world.
Congratulations go out to the Penguins for subsequently winning the game in double OT on a fair-and-square goal. The Senators gave the game and series one hell of a fight.
Since I am sure this will be asked in the comments section, the interference call on Dion Phaneuf in the third period on which the Pens scored a go-ahead goal was a penalty if one wants to go strictly by the Rule book (which is what oh-so-many fans seem to want, except if the call goes against their own team). Was there embellishment by Kessel? Probably. Should it have been called on a play that would have been icing, anyway? Well, that's a split-second decision. You could argue that one either way. That's part of why officiating is so complicated; the human element and the judgment aspect.
Mistakes happen. Skaters turn pucks over under pressure (or sometimes with no pressure), make errant passes, lose a coverage. Goalies commit a little too soon, come off their angle, mistime or fail to track some shots. Coaches end up in match-ups they would hoped to avoid. It's all part of a night's work in a game where perfection is damn near impossible and even Hall of Famers may only play a couple totally flawless games in an entire career.
These things are not chalked up to "incompetence" by those in the know. The problem is, though, that so few people are in the know about the challenges for officials. We don't skate 25 shifts. We skate one, unending shift for the duration of the game. Hence, "perfect games" for officials -- whether it's things that almost no one else notices, such as a less-than-perfect puck drop or not being in optimal position but still making the correct call -- are an impossibility.
All game long. officials have to make bang-bang decisions just like players do, and having been in both sets of skates in the NHL, I will tell you that the officiating side is sometimes even tougher. That's because, as a player, you can have tunnel vision to focus on one very narrow area whereas the officiating team has to collectively track what's going on both around and away from the puck over the entire ice surface.
Over the totality of last night's 85 game-minute tilt, I thought the veteran officiating team of Wes McCauley, Dan O'Halloran, Brian Murphy and Brad Kovachik did their usual excellent job. The players decided the game, and the vast majority of bang-bang calls were handled spot on.
Getting back to my original point about the deceptiveness of certain camera angles, it was a lesson I learned long before I ever became an official.
As most of you know, in addition to being a member of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame as a Stanley Cup winning coach with Chicago and a referee in four Stanley Cup Final series, my late grandfather Bill Stewart Sr. was a Major League Baseball umpire who worked in four World Series and four All-Star Games.
From Grampy and my dad, I learned a lot of things that I subsequently took into my own officiating career when my playing days were done.
Most famously, my grandfather was the second base umpire in Game One of the 1948 World Series between the eventual champion Cleveland Indians and the Boston Braves. With the game still scoreless in the eighth inning, Indians pitcher Bob Feller attempted to pick off baserunner Phil Masi at second base. It was a close play as Lou Boudreau applied the tag as Masi tried to scramble back to the bag.
My grandfather called Masi safe. Boudreau and the Indians argued the call. Subsequently, batter Tommy Holmes hit a single and Masi scored what proved to be the only run of the game.
After the game, newspaper photographs appeared to show Boudreau tagging Masi before the runner got back to the base. That stirred up the Indians fans even more.
Thing was: the photographic angles were skewed. My grandfather had the best possible angle to see whether or not Boudreau's glove was actually tagging Masi, and the umpire was only a few feet away.
To his dying day in 1964, Bill Stewart Sr. always insisted that he made the right call on the play. One time when I was very young, I asked him about the play and about the photos that appeared to contradict his ruling.
You need to understand something: my grandfather was an extremely honest man. If he was wrong, he admitted it. If he wasn't sure, he said he wasn't sure. Even in the privacy of talking to his young grandson, he insisted he made the right call on the tag play. I believed him then and I still believe him now.
"Photos can lie," he told me. "It can be unintentional or it can be intentional. Maybe the angle just isn't the best one. Maybe the photo was doctored to sell more newspapers. All I know is, I was five feet away and I saw what happened very clearly. No one else had my vantage point."
Since the Indians won the Series, guys like Feller and Boudreau were able to smile about the play years later (even if they continued to insist that the umpire got it wrong). My grandfather and the Indians' two Hall of Fame members made some money together in later years talking about the Series on the banquet circuit, especially around Cleveland.
My grandfather was a wise man in many, many ways. I never forgot what he told me about that long-ago tag play in the Fall Classic. When I later started my own refereeing career, I learned that he knew what he was talking about with cameras not always having the best perspective on a close play.
My grandpa was right, as usual. I found that out as an NHL referee after the introduction of video replay. Under the older in-house replay system, there was better communication than there is now between the officials on the ice and the replay folks about what actually happened on the play.
Let me give you one more prime and painful example.
My friend and linesman teammate official Pat Dapuzzo used to say that no one on our staff worked the net as closely as I did. That was a lesson learned after my first game in the NHL when my positioning, while good, could have been better. I would then have seen the puck and NOT disallowed the Bruins winning goal vs Canadiens.
It was a lesson that I took on the ice with me for the rest of my career.
One night at Madison Square Garden, officiating supervisor Matt Pavelich and the Replay Judge phoned down to me after a whistle to tell me I had missed a goal. The puck that had just been shot at the Ranger goal and then bounced crazily out toward center ice, in fact, had hit the twine.
"It's a goal," they said.
I told them that I couldn't agree but to go ahead and look at the video if the saw fit. I asked them, prior to actually stamping the shot a goal, to rewind the tape again, to look and see exactly where I was standing.
They did and said," You are right next to the post with your hand on the crossbar."
I then asked them why they though it was a goal. They responded by saying that the puck was shot with speed and it must have hit underneath the cross bar because it came out dead and took a funny bounce as a puck would, had it hit the twine.
"Did you clearly see the puck go in the net?" I asked.
"No, your arm and hand were in the way."
I did not argue that point but then added, " All that's true, but it didn't hit the net or the pipe."
"How do you know? It must have," they surmised.
"Well, I know because the puck hit my hand and broke my right index finger. It's no goal, trust me!"
The no-goal call on the ice stood. To this day, my crooked finger reminds me of two important lessons. First of all, get to the net! Secondly, don't put your bare hand on the damn crossbar or you are liable to get mangled fingers.
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Paul Stewart holds the distinction of being the first U.S.-born citizen to make it to the NHL as both a player and referee. On March 15, 2003, he became the first American-born referee to officiate in 1,000 NHL games.
Today, Stewart serves as director of hockey officiating for the ECAC.
Blogger •Former NHL Referee • 
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