{"id":654405,"date":"2026-05-07T00:27:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T00:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/654405\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T00:27:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T00:27:18","slug":"does-the-nhl-need-more-replay-reviews-for-penalties-and-scrums-or-would-they-slow-the-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/654405\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the NHL need more replay reviews for penalties and scrums or would they slow the game?"},"content":{"rendered":"

RALEIGH, N.C. — Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour figures the NHL has the best officials in the world. He still thinks they could use some help in sorting through the chaos \u2014 both before and after the whistle \u2014 that comes with the NHL playoffs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Brind’Amour has backed the idea of using more replay reviews to look not just at penalty calls but everything going on in those testier-with-every-round scrums. Not everyone agrees with Brind’Amour when it comes to reviewing penalty calls, though his larger point stands about getting the right call with the stakes involved in chasing the Stanley Cup.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t get better officials. We have the best \u2014 I want to make sure everybody understands that \u2014 I know no one else could do a better job,\u201d Brind\u2019Amour said with his team up 2-0 in a second-round series<\/a> against Philadelphia. \u201cBut man, it\u2019s just hard to see some of the penalties that are getting called, that if you just took a quick peek, you\u2019d go, \u2018Oh wait a minute, that\u2019s not what happened.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll get to it at some point, but I think they could use a little hand.\u201d<\/p>\n

Playoff games this year are averaging 10.6 penalties and 25.1 penalty minutes through Tuesday, according to SportRadar. That is the highest average number of penalties since 2009 (10.9), while this is just the second time since 2012 that the average of penalty minutes has exceeded 25 per game (it was 28 PIMs per game in 2023).<\/p>\n

NHL officials can review calls for non-fighting major and match penalties, then either confirm it or reduce it to a two-minute minor. They can also review double-minor high-sticking penalties to determine whether the stick involved actually belonged to the player being penalized.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s a harder job to officiate, and our guys don\u2019t get the credit they deserve,\u201d NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said Wednesday on ESPN\u2019s \u201cThe Pat McAfee Show.” <\/p>\n

\u201cI mean, they are moving with the flow of the game. They\u2019ve got to skate like the players, it\u2019s physical, they\u2019ve got to stay out of the way. There\u2019s a lot going on really fast. And it is remarkable how good a job they do and how much they get right. And video replay for us has really vindicated their performance even more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brind\u2019Amour, whose Hurricanes are the top seed in the Eastern Conference, first raised the topic after a first-round sweep of Ottawa<\/a>. That came after Senators forward Ridly Greig delivered two sucker punches<\/a> to Hurricanes defenseman Sean Walker \u2014 the second an uppercut to the face \u2014 while Walker was engaged with Senators forward Warren Foegele.<\/p>\n

Greig wasn’t penalized in that 4-2 series-closing loss<\/a>, though the NHL later suspended Greig<\/a> for two regular-season games. Compounding matters, Brind’Amour said, was the fact the Hurricanes emerged from that sequence shorthanded. He suggested having someone work solely to monitor replays and assist on-ice officials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only reason (Greig) did that was because he looked, no one’s watching, doesn’t get called for it, and we somehow ended up short on that,\u201d Brind’Amour said. \u201cThat’s wrong. That’s not right. Just get it right.”<\/p>\n

The issue is how best to accomplish that if expanded replay usage is one day adopted by the league.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a good question because like a lot of times guys get away with stuff in there,\u201d Buffalo Sabres forward Josh Dunne said about more replay reviews of scrums in particular. <\/p>\n

\u201cSome guy starts, another guy gets the penalty for it,” he said. “It\u2019s hard, it\u2019s a hard line. It\u2019s why it\u2019s so much on the judgment of the refs where it\u2019s like they can only see what they see, where it\u2019s like you never really know how these things get going.\u201d<\/p>\n

His coach, meanwhile, chuckled that he’s \u201cnot a huge fan of another video review.”<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t mind Rod’s thinking at all,\u201d said Lindy Ruff, whose Sabres are facing Montreal in Round 2<\/a>. \u201cI just think, boy, if now we’re going to review something, we start reviewing scrums, I just think players will start taking acting lessons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, some of that is already built into the game. Brind’Amour proved prophetic in pointing that out before Game 1 against the Flyers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is impossible to referee our sport live, it really is \u2014 it’s just everything’s happpening so fast, now you\u2019re getting embellishment everywhere,\u201d Brind\u2019Amour said then. \u201cSticks aren\u2019t even coming close to you, they\u2019re doing this (leans his head back) because why? Because if this goes like this (raises arm), you\u2019re getting a call. But if you’ve got a guy on the review that said, \u2018Whoa, whoa, whoa, that\u2019s embellishment,\u2019 it would be out of the game.”<\/p>\n

Days later, Hurricanes forward Jordan Martinook was penalized for high sticking while replays showed Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler grabbing Martinook’s stick and essentially hitting himself in the face<\/a> to sell the call.<\/p>\n

Dunne said he worried about the idea of slowing the game too much with more replay reviews, while Colorado Avalanche forward Brock Nelson said he largely \u201cliked where the game is at.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t want to make too many adjustments or critiques to the game,\u201d Nelson said before the Avalanche opened its series against Minnesota.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a traditionalist. The more rules you make, the more you have,” said Anaheim Ducks coach Joel Quenneville, whose team is battling the Vegas Golden Knights in Round 2. “There\u2019s always some extenuating consequences off of things like that. We got a lot of rules, so either way, I like to just get it right and move on. Either way it is, we\u2019ll move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP Hockey Writer John Wawrow in Buffalo, New York, and AP Sports Writers Mark Anderson in Las Vegas and Pat Graham in Denver contributed to this report.<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

AP NHL playoffs: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/stanley-cup<\/a> and https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/nhl<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"RALEIGH, N.C. — Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour figures the NHL has the best officials in the world.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,82857,85,41167,2137],"class_list":["post-654405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nhl","tag-nhl-hockey","tag-sports","tag-sports-officiating","tag-stanley-cup-playoffs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}