Ice Hockey is a tough game, and its players will frequently resort to illegal and vicious means to gain an advantage.

National Hockey League (NHL) officiating crews are there to keep things fair. That they so frequently, and for so long, have been seen as something less than fair is an issue that strikes at the very integrity of the game.

Unfortunately, the problem seems to be rooted in more than the mere ‘we was robbed’ mentality that flourishes in most fan bases. Officiating bias has been suggested by such varied yet substantial platforms as rigorous academic analysis and the blog posts of a retired referee.

Even the kind coverage of NHL broadcast rights holders has joined the chorus, as during Game 2 of the 2017 Stanley Cup Final, NBC commentator Mike Milbury described the officiating as “putrid”. It’s one thing when a fan cries foul, but officiating integrity has credibly been called into question more than once — as it relates to individual players, entire teams, ethnicity and even jersey colour.

Go on, Ref

Kerry Fraser was an NHL referee from 1980-2010. For several years after his retirement, his ‘C’Mon, Ref’ column appeared regularly at tsn.ca.

In 2014, discussing the push by NHL brass to eliminate diving from the game, Fraser wrote, ‘a “known offenders list” was mentally compiled and shared freely amongst the referees’.

In other words, a referee is conceding that referees allow reputation to influence their calls. But that is hardly the only bias.

Academia weighs in

In 2015, researchers from Brock University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst published a paper analysing more than 2.6 million player shifts over three NHL seasons. They found that French Canadian referees penalised English Canadian players at ‘significantly’ higher rates than did English Canadian officials.

“When two French referees are on the ice”, one of the study’s authors told CBC News, “English players get called for more penalties compared to French players”.

Another study, referenced above, concluded, ‘…it appears that there are ingrained practices of NHL officiating that defy fair play’. That work, analysing data from 2009 through 2014, found evidence of a tendency for officials to even out penalties — and even games. Specifically, they concluded, ‘(1) teams that have taken more penalties in a match are less likely to have the next penalty called against them, and (2) teams that are leading in a match are more likely to have the net penalty called against them.’

FiveThirtyEight.com, charting the years 2005-15, found similar evidence of makeup calls, noting further that playoff overtime periods were most obvious examples: ‘The second penalty call of the extra period (is) about three times as likely to be whistled on the team that received the first power play’, it found.

Bad guys wear black

Of course, some studies have suggested that NHL officials aren’t so much consciously exacting revenge as they are merely statistically stumbling into behavioral bias. In 2003, most teams in the NHL began wearing dark jerseys at home and white jerseys on the road, reversing previous practice. A study published in 2011, surveying all penalties called in all games over 25 seasons through 2010, teams in darker jerseys averaged roughly two more penalty minutes per game than their opponents.

One of the authors of the study, Gregory Webster of the University of Florida, conceded in an interview with NPR that there could be other factors, including that dark jerseys simply make players more aggressive, but concluded, “There is this very strong cultural association that comes through in how we think about colours in terms of white being associated with good and black with bad. Many of us are raised from childhood with some of these associations. And, over time, we develop a kind of cognitive bias. That’s been shown time and time again in social psychology.”

Vendettas?

While everything we’ve detailed so far may be cause for alarm, none of it generates as many doubts about the integrity of the games as the notion that refs carry grudges. Here are a couple of recent allegations of just that:

• During Montreal’s second-round series with Tampa Bay in 2015, Brandon Prust, in the process of racking up 31 penalty minutes, got into a shouting match with referee Brad Watson. Prust later described Watson as baiting him, saying, “He kept provoking me. He came to the box and called me every name in the book. He called me a piece of you-know-what, a mother-f’er, coward, said he’d drive me right out of the building.” Eventually, Prust was fined. Watson’s role in the dust-up was not examined, at least not publicly, by the NHL.

• In 2010, Vancouver forward Alexandre Burrows had three penalties called against him in the third period of a 3-2 home loss. After the game, he told reporters that veteran referee Stéphane Auger made the calls to get back at Burrows for a dive that prompted Auger to make a call later overturned by the league. “It was personal”, Burrows said. “The ref came over to me and said I made him look bad … He said he was going to get me back tonight, and he did his job in the third.” Burrows was later fined. Auger did not work the playoffs that season, and retired at age 41 following the 2012 season.

• This article was written by a Marketing Coordinator for Pro Stock Hockey, an online hockey store carrying authentic pro stock hockey equipment.