The NHL, with a history of being slow to come around at critical times, proved this past week it is capable of bullet-train-like alacrity, bouncing veteran referee Tim Peel less than 24 hours after he self-immolated with the help of a hot microphone.
If only the league could be so forthright on a consistent basis — like, say, two years ago this April when referees Dan O’Halloran and Eric Furlatt gift-wrapped the Sharks a Game 7 playoff win over the Golden Knights with an atrocious errant call against Vegas’s Cody Eakin.
Or, say, how league general managers, governors, and executive suits painfully and negligently dragged their feet not for days, not for weeks, not for months, but for years in dealing with head shots. It took Matt Cooke’s running shoulder check to Marc Savard’s noggin in March 2010 for the Lords of the Boards finally to legislate against targeted hits to the head.
The concussed Savard played only 32 more games before he was forced to call it quits. Cooke played another four-plus seasons before leaving the game at age 36, body and mind intact, with 1,135 penalty minutes chiseled into his résumé.
Peel, 53, and with 20-plus years and some 1,350 games on the whistle, on Tuesday night tagged Nashville’s Viktor Arvidsson with a two-minute minor for tripping Detroit’s Jon Merrill.
It was an unnecessary, ticky-tack call. Peel knew it. In fact, he admitted it, out loud and into a microphone, and got himself sacked for it.
The only solace in it all is that words matter, which is something, in this high-tech audio age, that no doubt will derail the career paths of other on-ice officials, players, coaches, or anyone connected to the game who unfurls a loose tongue in an unfortunate moment.
A reminder that the tape, both video and audio, is always rolling. Gotcha and gone. Peel, it should be noted, was failed by a member of the game’s tech crew who didn’t mute his microphone.
Less than three minutes after the call on Arvidsson, the Predators TV broadcast picked up Peel saying, “It wasn’t much (read: ticky-tack), but I wanted to get a [expletive] penalty against Nashville early.”
That didn’t play well to anyone’s ear, obviously, because it painted Peel potentially as a prejudiced, unfair arbiter. Here in the dawning age of pro sports gambling, such words could trigger a riot.
Keep in mind, many of us (hand way, way up here) often criticize NHL referees, particularly those with little experience, for not using feel or instinct relative to the rulebook and their ability to manage games and keep play under control.
Only Peel knows exactly what he was doing or how he felt in the moment. Maybe he does have some underlying grudge for Predators players or coaches. If so, then he was fired with appropriate cause. Case closed. Next man up in stripes and whistle. Referees really are the only people in the rink who can’t deal in grudges. Everywhere else, great, because it feeds into the emotion we love.
It’s also quite possible, even likely, Peel was living to that unofficial “game management” standard that so many of us demand, even expect, from the refereeing crew. Part of that unwritten code is for the referee, or referees, to make clear what will or won’t be called. When implemented under best intentions, it can be a referee’s way of dialing down a game’s temperature, or not allowing it to boil over into head shots, aggravated stick violations, or fights and injuries.
Some of the game’s great referees, Wally Harris and John McCauley among them, controlled the game with feel the way Picasso worked a canvas with brush. Refereeing done right is an art form. A ticky-tack call here and there can be essential brush strokes.
Bruins fans only have to flip the calendar back to March 5, the night at the Garden that Tom Wilson put a running shoulder into Brandon Carlo’s head at 18:30 of the first period. The referees, Dean Morton and Pierre Lambert, made no call on the play, which had Wilson’s brutish right shoulder hammering Carlo’s head into the glass. No call. Not even a minor.
Thankfully, the league’s Department of Player Safety caught up with Wilson the next day and ran him out of the rink for the next seven games. None of which took the sting out of Carlo’s brain injury.
In the moments leading up to the hit, Wilson twice tagged Trent Frederic with heavy hits along the wall. One or both could have been called, if either “Do Nothing” Morton or “Nothing Doing” Lambert had seized the moment and realized Wilson was operating with a hunting license. Then they missed his big pop on Carlo. In the span of about 10 seconds, they displayed no feel and no judgment. Tidy bit of work that. Thankfully, neither said anything egregious caught on tape.
Peel, whose 2019-20 season was cut short in December when he suffered a fractured ankle on the job, was due to call the final game of his career April 24. Instead, the league ran him off to the badlands Wednesday morning. His faux pas in Nashville will be both footnote and lasting embarrassment to his career.
“There is no justification for his comments,” noted director of hockey operations Colin Campbell in the league’s media release, “no matter the context or his intention, and the NHL will take any and all steps necessary to protect the integrity of our game.”
Two years ago, after the botched call by O’Halloran and Furlatt, both continued their careers. Golden Knights GM George McPhee said the league quickly followed with an apology (believed to be from commissioner Gary Bettman). O’Halloran retired after one more season; Furlatt remains on the job.
It took years for his prolonged concussion symptoms to subside, but Savard is back in Ontario and enjoying retirement after spending last season as a member of the Blues’ coaching staff.
Carlo, finally back skating this past week, hopes to return soon to the Bruins’ lineup.
Hockey is a game full of emotions, snap decisions, missteps in judgment, and human error, mistakes of thought, deed, and word.
Peel didn’t get canned for a ticky-tack call, but rather his mistake in blurting it for all to hear. Otherwise, he submitted good time and performed good work for more than a quarter-century. The league didn’t have to brand him a loser on the way out the door, especially when league bosses know how the game’s been called for decades.
By dismissing him so abruptly, at least let’s hope the league indeed has set a new standard, one that will have everyone, executive office included, paying the price for bad calls, poor judgment, and willful negligence. Even in cases without incriminating audiotape.
ON THE SKIDS
Nothing doing in Buffalo
The Sabres, in town for Saturday’s matinee setback, extended their mind-numbing skid to 17 games, an 0-15-2 stretch which dated to their last win, Feb. 23 vs. the Devils. The drubbing has included five shutouts and a minus-44 goal differential (71-27).
Come the end of Thursday night’s 4-0 whitewashing in Pittsburgh, Taylor Hall was casually saying, sure, he’s up for a deadline deal if rookie GM Kevyn Adams finds a taker. Ya think?! Even at $8 million for the season, the former Hart Trophy winner must feel like a trapped in that lineup.
Since winning the MVP (Hart) with the Devils in 2018, Hall collected 106 points in his 130 games leading to Saturday’s faceoff. Most Cup contenders will kick tires, including the Bruins, who would drop Hall at David Krejci’s left wing and then figure out how the rest of the parts fit.
As for what the Sabres can expect in return, not a lot, unless one of the top dogs in the hunt feels he can be the tipping point in winning 16 playoff games. The Oilers, Hall’s home for six seasons before Peter Chiarelli wheeled him out for Adam Larsson, lack scoring punch after the dynamic Connor McDavid-Leon Draisaitl duo. He’d make the Oilers better, but by no means a favorite.
The Islanders have lost top left winger Anders Lee with a blown ACL. No chance he is back until next season. So Lou Lamoriello has the need and the financial wiggle room. He is also a wise negotiator, which means he won’t overreach for Hall, who will hit the UFA market July 28 for a second year in a row.
If the Oilers make a play, look for that to happen in the next few days rather than up against the April 12 trade deadline. Anyone entering Canada to join an NHL team must endure a two-week quarantine period, leaving new arrivals a small window to fit into a lineup prior to the start of the postseason (tentatively May 11).
Meanwhile, the Sabres departed Causeway Street with only six wins through 33 games. But here’s the good news, as pointed out by Bob Waterman at the Elias Sports Bureau: In a 56-game season, they cannot finish worse than a 10.7 percent win rate.
The expansion (1974-75) Washington Capitals, under GM Milt Schmidt, finished 8-67-5, winning only 10 percent of their games. The Sabres can lose every game the rest of the way and the Capitals will hold serve at 10 percent.
ETC.
The Bruins yielded some of their practice time at Warrior in recent days, the Brighton arena playing host to the four women’s teams, including the Boston Pride, battling for the NWHL’s Isobel Cup.
Bruins winger Charlie Coyle recalled Friday that former Harvard forward Jillian Dempsey, captain of the Pride, was a regular at his practices in Weymouth as a young teen, and he’s often envied how well many of the women players skate.
“Hockey’s for everyone, and they’re not an exception,” said Coyle, 29, whose sister Jess also grew up playing hockey in Weymouth. “I wish I could skate like they do — they’re so smooth, and there’s some good skill.”
Coyle recalled his Weymouth mite team, some 20 years ago, was backed by Kristen Conners, who later led Fontbonne Academy to a state title at TD Garden with four consecutive playoff shutouts.
“She was best in the league,” said Coyle. “We won the championship that year, and it’s good times looking back. We didn’t think anything of it, you know, she was just one of the team members and played a big role and helped us.”
In his middle-schools years, one of Coyle’s teammates was Dempsey’s brother, and they’d routinely accompany each other to practice on the boys’ team.
“She’d come out there and show us up pretty much,” noted Coyle. “She competed with us, fit right in, if not better than most of us.”
Ice hockey was rarely an option, or even a thought, for girls in Massachusetts through the 1970s and into the ’80s. Baby Boomers grew up in the Bay State believing that hockey was exclusively a boys’ sport. Girls, if they chose to skate, almost exclusively tooled around in standard white high-laced figures.
Thankfully, that’s all changed, perhaps underscored best in 1998 when the United States beat Canada for the Olympic gold at Nagano, the first time women’s hockey was part of the Games. A good number of those US women developed their games by playing on mixed-gender teams, or sometimes forcing their way onto boys’ teams.
Bruins defenseman Steven Kampfer, who made a point to give the Isobel contenders a shout-out this past week before a Zoom session with media members, grew up in Jackson, Mich., just west of Ann Arbor. When he began youth hockey in the mid-’90s, it was a given that boys and girls played on the same teams.
“At age 6-8, you’re not even thinking about it,” said Kampfer. “You’re getting dressed and playing hockey with your teammates. We talk all the time about hockey being for everybody, anybody can play, and it was fun. You make a lot of relationships through hockey and in sports.”
One of the top players in his age group, recalled Kampfer, was Rachel Davis, who went on to play defense for Ohio State about the same time he was playing at Michigan.
“She happened to be, at the time, one of our best defensemen,” said Kampfer. “It was great to see Rachel go on and do great things. And it’s nice to see the girls back home now, who are family friends of ours that are playing, doing great things, as well.”
Rask still waiting for No. 300
Injured again Thursday night, Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask was forced to wait a little longer for his 300th career win. He’ll be the first Maple Leafs draftee ever to reach the plateau and one of only 37 in NHL history to get there.
The Bruins have yet to draft a goalie who has rung up 300 career wins, but three came close: Dan Bouchard, No. 27/1970, 286 wins; Ken Dryden, No. 14/1964, 258 wins; Bill Ranford, No. 52/1985, 240 wins.
Of the three, only Ranford recorded any of his wins (52) with the Bruins.
Rask, a Leafs first-round pick (No. 21), will be the third goalie in the 2005 draft class to reach 300 wins, joining Montreal’s Carey Price (No. 5, 358 wins), and Los Angeles’s Jonathan Quick (No. 72, 331 wins).
The three goalies with the most career wins are Martin Brodeur (691), Patrick Roy (551), and Roberto Luongo (489).
The Bruins had no shot at drafting Brodeur, taken 20th by the Devils in 1990. Boston made the next pick, Bryan Smolinski.
In 1984, they made two picks, Dave Pasin (19) and Ray Podloski (41), prior to the Canadiens picking off Roy at No. 51.
In 1997, selecting No. 1, they opted for Joe Thornton, who was followed by Patrick Marleau (San Jose), Olli Jokinen (Los Angeles), and Luongo (Islanders).
Loose pucks
The Bruins and Canadiens haven’t faced one another in more than 13 months. David Pastrnak connected for a hat trick and Patrice Bergeron scored once in the 4-1 win at the Garden Feb. 20, 2020. Nick Suzuki potted the lone goal for Claude Julien’s CH charges . . . Your faithful puck chronicler noted here recently, following a Rangers shellacking of the Flyers that had the Blueshirts up, 9-0, after 40 minutes, that it was Bruce Cassidy’s Capitals who last held a 9-0 advantage in the second period: Jan. 11, 2003 vs. Mike Keenan’s Panthers. Jaromir Jagr scored a 3-4—7 bounty through two periods and then, per Cassidy, shut it down for the day, despite being in position to chase a mark that Cassidy could not recall. It was likely Darryl Sittler’s 6-4—10 motherlode against the Bruins on Feb. 7, 1976. Sittler, with Dave Reece in the Boston net, slammed home hat tricks in the second and third periods at Maple Leaf Gardens. A little more than 45 years later, the 10-spot stands as the most points collected in a single game. Opposing netminder that night: Wayne Thomas . . . Marc Savard, by the way, is back home in the Kingston, Ontario area and spends some of his hours raising money for concussion research. Check out his shopping website, p91shop.com, for details about purchasing hats, hoodies, and T-shirts as a way of helping the cause.
Kevin Paul Dupont can be reached at kevin.dupont@globe.com.