We all want to see them get the officiating calls right, so it would be nice to give video review the benefit of the doubt. Problem is, the more reviews, the more incredulity, the more doubt cast on the system. Like Zac Rinaldo, it is out of control.

The technology is in place to be used, not misused. Too many rulings coming out of Toronto are as big a mystery as how the Golden Knights are doing it.

We went to the rulebook to check the exact wording of the standard of evidence– irrefutable? conclusive?–required for the Situation Room in Toronto to overturn a call by a referee. We found there was no wording at all, just a list of situations subject to video review.

Thus, there is nothing in there about a call having to be blatantly incorrect to be overturned, so lord help the anonymous persons in a room–none of them experienced referees or linesmen–who, after four looks from four angles may still be less likely to get it right than an experienced zebra was with his naked eye.

Of course, whatever words they would put in that book wouldn’t necessarily help decide if the alleged crease interloper was pushed with enough force, or had violated air space of the crease in brushing the goalie with a leap as the shot came through, or maybe didn’t even have to be in the crease to be keeping the netminder from fairly playing the shot. So why are they looking for something hasn’t even been defined to them?

Only for whether the puck ever entered the goal, or was over any line–be it a goalline, a blueline, a trapezoid line–can any replay come close to being definitive. And even then, there was a Philadelphia goal disallowed last week in Ottawa because of something called “intent to blow the whistle” that made seeing not believing regardless.

The refs are human, their eyes can deceive them, so it is inevitable that fans wonder what the guys in the striped shirts were looking at. But to add another level of doubt about the call of a double-secret guy in a room defeats the purpose of the entire exercise, slows down the game, and worst of all, puts too much doubt into the essential reason we watch—the explosion of joy at a goal.

There is so much review that in the back of your mind, you know you might be rising for nothing, so you probably cheer a little less enthusiastically. At least before video review there was a referee instantly and definitively waving his arms, killing the joy almost before it could begin. Now, you wait and then sometimes wait longer to find out whether the score really is tied late in the third period.

Could the player committing the interference have stopped? Did he embellish the force of the contact that had pushed him into the goalie? In the majority of the cases, that does not become more obvious on the screen, and especially not in slow-mo that often gives the illusion of purpose to what may not have been purposeful at all.

The NHL added one more qualified set of eyes when it added a second referee, which renders superfluous additional sets of unqualified eyes not trained as to what to look for on monitors. Worse, their presence may be causing the trained eyes to not bear down quite as hard in the knowledge that final call will be out of their hands. The refs and linesmen could never admit this and keep their jobs, but we’re just sayin’. Nobody is quitting on his feet out there, but the pressure is off and human nature is what it is

In that same game in Ottawa, the interference Jordan Weal committed on Craig Anderson–uncalled on the ice–was still arguable after three looks or 300 looks, and it got reversed by, well, we’ll never know who. At least before replay there was somebody with a number on a striped shirt or a name on the back to be the object of your disdain, all part of the game. That’s what the refs are being paid to do. Train them well to do it to the best of their ability and then advise and grade them appropriately. Do not then undercut them.

So with the reversal of that goal in Ottawa, the Flyers had not tied the game after all, just like happened again to them in the final minute, when the replay clearly showed Sean Couturier had jammed the puck into the net, only to have referee Steve Kozari say that he had intended to blow the whistle because he had lost sight of the puck.

What? The intent-to-blow-the-whistle rule was put in for cases of whistle malfunction, which happens even less often than Marc Staal scores a goal. There are not enough worms in the world – or in the NHL team front offices–to fit into cans that are opened by a rule allowing for anything to be waved off by a referee’s “intent to blow the whistle.” In the most rare of circumstances that his pea turns up missing or he gets knocked down and out of view of the play, then the other ref can call it. Or not.

It should be that simple, just like the rulebook should be but also is not. All the additions–good ones too–over the years have too often not been accompanied by necessary subtractions.

For all the space there is in cyberspace, we don’t have enough here to keep you from nodding off–just like the Rangers in the first period–while spelling out all the ambiguity in the rulebook. Relevant to the Couturier goal that wasn’t, Rule 78.5 says: “An apparent goal shall be disallowed when the referee deems the play has been stopped, even if he had not physically had the opportunity to stop play by blowing the whistle.” Meanwhile, Rule 38.4 states that video review process shall be permitted to assist the referees in determining the legitimacy of ALL potential goals.

So the Couturier’s goal was looked at in Toronto regardless, even though the ref said play was dead, one more waste of time in a review system that like Audrey, the Venus flytrap in Little Shop of Horrors, is insatiably eating up our confidence that what we are watching is actually what we are watching. The players themselves are too often dumbfounded.

“For me, there’s so many changes from year to year and what they’re calling from goalie interference and things like that, that I don’t even know the rules,” Brian Elliott, an 11-year veteran goaltender, said. “I don’t even know when a guy bumps me.

“You have time to reset, but you’re not on your angle, and he scores, is that interference? Yes, but I don’t know. There are so many things that you go out there and you complain that you got interfered with and see what happens.”

Review is not helping with that, only further confusing the issue.

At least the league has done something about all those tedious looks for offsides following goals. It was an excellent decision to make a coach pay with a two-minute penalty for challenging an alleged offside that really wasn’t. Let that be a step in the right direction to streamline the replay system that is taking too much of the joy out of the viewing experience.

This is not just in hockey. College football games are almost never over in less than three-and-a-half hours. The NFL command center searches for the slightest movement of the ball in the receivers’ hands to definitively show that he did not have control of the ball as he crossed the sideline, even as the replay shows both feet clearly were in and the ball never went to the ground. ZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

The final minute of a close NBA game, which should be its most compelling 60 seconds, has become unwatchable as referees go to the courtside screen to reset clocks and check calls.

Safe or out, fair or foul, has replay making the most sense for a sport like baseball, which is primarily non-contact, at least until the rule was changed on catchers blocking the plate. So replay is now also used for that–a judgment call that should be made by the plate umpire. And what is coming through the headsets is too often baffling.

By the way, seeing sinkerball pitchers rendered helpless by umps that refuse to give the low strike has convinced us that electronic eyes should call balls and strikes. So we are not anti-replay, just pro uniformity, something not coming out of the NHL Situation Room, just a bad situation for the NHL to have put itself, out of whatever good intentions.

“They are adding more and more skin to the onion and all it does now is make you cry,” said Paul Stewart, the former NHL referee. “It takes the electricity out of the building.

“I call it the last straw of athletics. Everybody is reaching for it to save the game for them.”

The NHL should be checking monitors for pucks in relations to the lines, whether shots went in and out of the goal too quickly to be seen, or went through a hole in the net. And that’s it. Distinct kicking motions? Well, maybe, but that’s a judgment, too, where the rule should define that the planting of the skate for a deliberate redirection allows for a legal goal.

Somebody who knows the game and can write needs to be commissioned to take the ambiguity out of the rulebook. And great hockey minds need to meet to subdue the replay monster that is swallowing the spontaneity of the game.

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