While the headlines will read about the Dallas Stars defeating the Detroit Red Wings 3-1 in what would seem like a harmless game, what you’ll miss out on if you casually stroll by the box score is what happened that should’ve made it a 2-2 game halfway through the third.  What you’ll miss out on is a gross misuse of the rule book by NHL officials Dennis LaRue and Stephane Auger.  What you’ll miss out on is this.

Now, I’m not going to come out here and whine and pee my pants over a very obviously blown ruling.  What I’m going to do is call out these officials for being complete cowards.

The final ruling on this play was that “the whistle had blown” and there was no goal because of that.  Funny thing about that ruling is that the whistle did blow… About three seconds after the puck was in the net.  Now there’s a fuzzy thing in the NHL rulebook about having the “intent to blow the whistle” and that’s put in use when something happens in the gray area time inbetween the play and what should be a dead play.

The problem there being that the official states that the whistle had blown to kill the play.  Well sure, the play is good and dead when you’ve scored a goal.  Now give the NHL boys in Toronto’s replay war room credit, they called the Joe almost immediately to tell them that they screwed up and they’d better get it right.  Instead, LaRue and Auger decided to do a very Major League Baseball-like thing and say, “Nope, I’m right because I say I’m right and there ain’t no stupid television camera that’s going to tell me different.”

Instead, these two make a bad situation worse because they’re first wrong about the goal and then they’re wrong about their reason for it not being a goal.  Just perfect.  Do I expect any kind of punishment from the NHL to the officials for bludgeoning a call? Of course not.  If anything, Herr Bettman has shown nothing but blind support to his vision-impaired men in black and white and I expect there to be nothing different this time.

Gary Bettman looks totally awesome in tights.

I’d call it a case of the blind leading the blind, but it comes off more like the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading the rats out of town.   The only difference here being that Piper Bettman is putting the rats on a Rose Bowl-kind of float to show how much he loves them while he leads all the fans out of town.  After all the God-awful officiating we’ve seen in Major League Baseball’s playoffs to the horrific nightly car crash that the NBA calls the situation with its referees (who are probably the most crooked of them all) to even World Cup soccer qualifying it makes sense that even the NHL can’t get their act together.  All I ask is that they try to give a damn and not let some self-important bloated opinion of themselves get in the way of getting the game right.

I know that’s asking a lot but hey at least Bill McCreary setting the example for other officials how to hog the spotlight is going away after this year, we can only hope it hasn’t caught on too much.  Wait, Kerry Fraser is going away too, right?  Maybe things will get better.

I’m not holding my breath.  After all, Kelly Sutherland is a long way off from retiring.