Kill the Ump!

There is no joy in Mudville this week, Mudville being Las Vegas. After last year's implausible climb to the Stanley Cup finals in their inaugural season, the Vegas Golden Knights bowed out in the first round in their second. And a couple of things hurt--they blew a three-games-to-one series lead, and the lost the seventh game after leading 3-0 after a major penalty was caused.

The facts are these: Cody Eakin, after a face-off, cross-checked (that is, pushed his stick into the chest of) Joe Pavelski of the San Jose Sharks. He went backwards and collided with another Golden Knight, Paul Stastny, and hit the ice with an injury, bleeding. It was only then that the referees called a penalty, and made it a major one. In a minor penalty, the penalized player comes out of the penalty box when the other team scores, or two minutes, which ever comes first. With a major penalty, five minutes are put on the clock, and the victimized team can score as many times as they can.

For Vegas it may go down as the worst five minutes in Stanley Cup history. The Sharks scored four times, gaining the lead. Vegas scored again to tie it, but lost in overtime. At the time of the penalty, they had a 99 percent chance of winning.

I've written before about officials changing the outcome of games, and even with extensive replay it still happens. In the NFC Championship Game last year, a blatant pass interference call by the L.A. Rams was not called against the New Orleans Saints, very likely ending a chance for them to score and win the game. And St. Louis fans will never forget Don Denkinger's blown call in the 1985 World Series, or Oriole fans Richie Garcia's call on the Jeffrey Maier interference that was ruled a home run for Derek Jeter. Those baseball plays happened before replay, and would have been overturned, but the Saints and Golden Knights are still smarting.

This calls into mind the question of whether there should be replay at all. All sports had no replay for decades; it's only the advancement in technology that has made it possible, and therefore the contingent that says, "Get it right," has triumphed. But there are still plays that are not reviewed--penalties in both football and hockey, for example. Should everything be reviewable? Interestingly, baseball does not review balls and strikes, which it easily could--the square that networks put up delineating the strike zone could easily replace umpires calling balls and strikes. But do we want that?

Players are human--they make mistakes. So do officials. We don't reverse mistakes by players, should we by refs and umps? I honestly don't know. What I do know is that the Golden Knights could have still won the game if they hadn't gotten the yips and let up four goals in five minutes, which is atrocious penalty killing (I watched most of it that horrible five minutes, and they barely cleared the zone). They could have won game six if they hadn't missed an open net at least four times. The Cardinals could have won the '85 World Series in game seven, but got blown out by the Royals. Most players and coaches don't do a lot of belly-aching about blown calls, because they know they all even out in the end, but when a call helps end your season, it's hard to be magnanimous.

Notably, the referees involved in that call are done for the season, a possible rebuke by the league. In hockey, like most other sports, there are unwritten rules. In an overtime period, penalties are rarely called. To call a major penalty at the end of a game seven seems almost belligerent. Would Vegas have won if Eakin had been given a two-minute minor? Yes, I think so. But we'll never know now.