Video replay can’t deal with the supernatural mysticism of hockey

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An unfortunate mistake was made at a crucial moment in Sunday’s Panthers-Bruins playoff game.

The Bruins led early, but were in the process of handing it back. During a Florida power play in the third, Bruins forward Charlie Coyle drifted slowly toward his own net. Panther Sam Bennett hovered behind him.

As a scrum formed in the goalmouth, Bennett gave Coyle a light shove. More of a bracing, really. Coyle tipped over onto his goalie, Jeremy Swayman, who was already splay-legged in the crease.

While the two Bruins lolled on the ice, the puck caromed out to Bennett, who tapped it into the empty side of the goal.

Why was Coyle facing his own goal? And why was he hovering right on top of his goalie? Why was he standing in the crease at all? The only way you’re stopping anything in that position is if a snapshot hits you in the back of the head. These are the important questions about that play.

Instead, Boston immediately turned to an appeal to the video-replay booth back in Toronto. That was the unfortunate part.

In the old NHL, we accepted that what happened within five feet of the goal line stayed within five feet of the goal line. There’s too much going on in there to sort it out after the fact.

With video review, we have all joined the Warren Commission and are nightly handed the Zapruder film. Let’s slow this baby down to 1/25th speed and focus in on whose skate blade was which side of what opponent’s stick.

In this case, they got it right. The goal was allowed. Florida went on to win 3-2.

It got more unfortunate after the game when the Bruins’ pulled out their Big Book of Complaints and Excuses.

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“The fact is that Coyle was pushed into me. I couldn’t play my position,” Swayman said. “In that moment, I didn’t know what exactly happened. I just know I couldn’t play my position. And the review showed that.”

By this logic, every time a guy is coming up the ice with his head down and is knocked into next week, he has been prevented from ‘playing his position.’

If Swayman wants unfettered freedom of his crease, maybe he ought to put up a sign in the lunchroom advising teammates not to hang around inside it. The playing-his-position philosophy is antithetical to a contact sport.

All the Bruins, players and coach, had the same basic line – ‘We’re not making excuses, but …’ – and then with the excuses.

If they want to be angry at someone, be angry at Coyle. He had a bad moment.

But the real villain here is the expanding mandate of video review. The NHL’s been playing with this idea for decades, and though it doesn’t work, it eats up more game time and mental space each year.

Video review is good for one thing – reassessing objective reality in a more manageable time frame.

Was the runner’s foot on the bag before the ball entered the glove? Video review is better at that than the human eye. One could argue that the human eye is useless at doing this, but that’s a different conversation.

When it comes to bang-bang plays in baseball, video review is indisputable. It’s good for offside in soccer and photo finishes in every sort of racing.

What video review is not good at is reassessing subjective reality after the fact and out of context.

Did Bennett impede Swayman? Yes. That’s his whole job. Florida pays him US$5-million a year to impede goalies.

If he’d come swooping in from the blue line and smashed Coyle in the back two-handed, whereupon Coyle’s body had hit Swayman with such force that his helmet popped off and you wondered for a second if his head had gone with it, that would have been no goal. No video replay required.

But on the ice, in the moment, using their experience, the officials determined that Bennett had not crossed a shifting line that no one in hockey can place with precision. This is a purely subjective judgment.

Slowing down the play doesn’t clarify it. Having another half-dozen people stare at it for five minutes doesn’t make the call any fairer or unfairer. All it does is muddle the situation.

You could play this game all over the ice all of the time.

What is interference? When is it hooking? What’s the difference between fun roughing and a roughing penalty? They have written rules for all this stuff, but they are guidelines, not holy writ.

You know what all those things are, but you probably couldn’t explain it. Were you to try, there would be a hundred switchbacks: ‘But not if they have the lead;’ ‘Not in the last five minutes;’ ‘Not in the playoffs.’ This mysticism is the essence of hockey.

Video replay is not equipped to handle the supernatural. What it is good at is turning good players into whiners.

Whining is for soccer. Basketball is getting there, too. It is tolerated, even celebrated, in those games because of their theatrical nature. People like the fakery and pretend outrage. If they didn’t, it would go away.

Hockey’s brand is anti-gamesmanship and anti-theatre. It’s the sport where guys lose teeth and break fingers and keep playing. People want gladiators, not Lincoln lawyers arguing their case in the dressing room later.

Video replay is bad for hockey, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s wrong for the sport. As we are all discovering right now, more technology does not automatically equal justice or well-being.

Sometimes the old, non-digital and occasionally unfair ways are the best ways. As in any other facet of life, complaining won’t get you as far as scoring more often than everyone else.