Watching the Montreal Canadiens this season has so far has been fun, frustrating, and at times infuriating. The most consistent source of frustration has probably been the goaltending the team has received this season, but close behind that has been officiating.
That’s not new, nor is it unique for sports fans, though I do think the NHL’s officiating is significantly worse than most other sports. Talk to any fanbase in the NHL for long enough, and they’ll probably tell you the refs are out to get them, and have a bunch of examples of times the officials have screwed them out of a win, or into a loss.
As viewers, we log and remember those moments, and skim past the times it goes the other way, because those usually feel deserved. Being a fan creates a lens through which you experience watching a sport. However, that doesn’t mean that officials don’t have biases, don’t act with human, spiteful intent, or even target specific teams at times.
Long term, I don’t believe officials have it out for any specific team, but there is retribution in the NHL. Heck, disgraced former NHL referee Tim Peel told me as much after an episode of Game Over Montreal in 2022. After Nathan MacKinnon slashed linesman Michel Cormier in a game against the Bruins, he said there would be comeuppance for the Avalanche in the playoffs.
The Avalanche had the second-best penalty differential in the NHL during the regular season at +0.54 more power plays than penalty kills per 60 minutes, mostly on the strength of drawing calls, ranking third in the NHL in drawn calls per 60 minutes. Come playoff time, while penalty calls went way up, Colorado dropped down to 11th of 16 teams in drawn calls per 60 minutes. Coincidence? Maybe, but one worth noting.
This season, especially since Martin St-Louis criticized the officials after a 6-5 loss to the Edmonton Oilers on October 23, it has certainly seemed like the Canadiens have been getting a raw deal where officiating is concerned. Several Canadiens fans have reached out to me asking me to look into it, most recently Carl Boudreau.
Going through every game tracking missed infractions for a single team is an undertaking of hundreds of hours at least, not to mention having to do the same for the rest of the league for proper context, so I can’t do that unless someone wants to pay me a lot of cash. But what I can do is dig into what is available already.
Data Collection & Methodology
Starting this undertaking, I had to decide what information I wanted to acquire to see if something weird is going on. For starters, I wanted to look at what kinds of penalties the Canadiens have been taking and drawing. Ideally, separated by period, and game state (tied, leading, or trailing). Fights and 10-minute misconducts that don’t create a power play weren’t relevant, so I didn’t bother recording those.
Unfortunately, the NHL does not make this information easy to access. The NHL’s penalty data on their own official stats page is sparse if you’re being kind, straight up useless if you’re being honest. In order to get the data I wanted, I went through each boxscore individually. As I was going through, I realized there was another data point I wanted as well: coincidental minors. Once I started digging in, I was very glad I decided to track those too.
For each minor infraction the Canadiens have taken this season, I recorded what kind of penalty it was, who took it, what period it was in, the game state, and whether or not it was coincidental. For each minor infraction the Canadiens drew, I recorded the same information only adding the Canadiens player who drew the call.
My thoughts were to parse the data through different filters just to see if anything stood out beyond the Canadiens taking the third-most penalties per 60 minutes in the league, and possessing the fourth-worst penalty differential.
Preliminary Case Study
In trying to find a database I could pull from to start this project, I came across this Reddit thread from five years ago by user aschwan41 where he pulled penalty data from 2010 through 2021. Their findings were my first baseline to measure against.
What infractions the league prioritizes to call changes over time, so I don’t think we can use this 11-season dataset as a surefire baseline to measure the Canadiens against, but an interesting starting point question was how closely the kinds of penalties aligned with that database.
I had to alter some of the tracked numbers from the Reddit thread since they included data I wasn’t interested in like fighting, and I combined some things like double minors as two separate infractions of the same type.
The most common calls in the NHL are tripping, hooking, roughing, and interference in that order, with high-sticking, slashing, and holding also being quite frequent. Big databases like this will be much smoother than individual teams, so a big difference here doesn’t mean much, especially in a single season with only 34 games played in the sample, but I think it’s still interesting.
The Canadiens draw a lot of tripping calls, almost a quarter of the penalties they draw are trips. That makes sense when you think about what kind of team the Canadiens are; all about speed. Curiously, that should also result in more hooking and holding calls, but the Canadiens draw both at a lower rate than the 11-season average.
The Canadiens also draw a significantly higher number of roughing calls, which doesn’t fit with the idea of them being a soft team, per se. They also draw very few high-sticking calls; nearly half of the average frequency of the large sample.
On the other side of the coin, the Canadiens take significantly fewer tripping calls than they draw, just over half in raw totals; 29 drawn and just 16 taken. Based on the large sample, the Habs are about average in frequency of hooking calls, while they also take far more roughing calls than average, and just over half the frequency of interference calls.
They do take a lot of high-sticking and slashing calls, along with more holding calls than their opponents. This information is interesting, but it doesn’t really tell us much outside of what is being called. Let’s dig deeper.
Game Management
We all know game management exists. In an ideal world, the concept of game management is simply keeping the temperature at a level where stupid things don’t matter. In practice, the NHL clearly officiates the score, and the time of the game. We all know that what is and isn’t a penalty changes based on who is leading, and what period the game is in. Heck, the aforementioned Tim Peel was involuntarily retired for admitting game management is a thing on a hot mic.
So how have the Habs’ officiating fortunes changed based on the score?
Here’s where things start to get really interesting, but given that we’re only looking at a single team case study, remember that we’re not drawing conclusions yet. However … this is pretty wild. Luckily, thanks to Natural Stat Trick, we have ice-time data in tied, leading, and trailing situations, so we can even give penalties-per-60-minutes rates for all these metrics, and see the changes period to period.
When the game is tied, the Montreal Canadiens actually draw slightly more power plays than their opponents do, with 11.4 per cent of all infractions being coincidental minors where no team gets a power play. Tied situations are the baseline to measure against here, since that’s where everything is equal and the game doesn’t need to be managed.
In the NHL with game management, you expect that teams who are leading get fewer power plays. This is something we observe enough that it’s a standard operating assumption with the NHL. Coincidental calls while the Canadiens are leading go up slightly, but it’s not a statistically significant change, especially given the small sample size we’re working with this season.
When leading, the Canadiens see a 16 per cent drop in their power plays per 60 minutes, from 3.1 to 2.6, while their opponents receive power plays at a 26.3% higher rate, going from 3.0 power plays per 60 minutes when tied, to 3.7 when the Canadiens lead. With just a single team broken down, we can’t say whether this is normal or abnormal, however it does generally fit with how we expect NHL officiating to work, even if it shouldn’t.
When the Canadiens are trailing though, that’s where my eyebrow involuntarily raised a centimetre.
As opposed to their opponents, the Canadiens do not get a boost in power-play opportunities when they’re trailing. In fact, they draw power plays at a rate 9.3% lower than when the game is tied, just 2.8 per hour. Their opponents meanwhile, get a power play boost when the situation is reversed, this time of 10.8%. That’s curious enough on its own, but when you look at coincidental minors, there’s an even bigger anomaly.
While the Canadiens trail, both teams get a lower share of the total infractions awarding them a power play because suddenly almost a third of all the calls are coincidental. Far from a small sample size without a statistically significant variance, coincidental minors go from 0.8 per 60 minutes in tied situations to 2.4 per 60 minutes while the Canadiens trail. The share of total minor penalty calls that are coincidental more than doubles while the Canadiens are trailing.
This is decidedly weird, but let’s break things down by period as well.
Once again, right away there’s some weirdness here. In the first and second periods, the Canadiens actually draw penalties slightly more often than they take them, while the percent of total minors that are coincidental changes a bit, but not to an extreme degree.
All that goes out the window in the third period, where the Canadiens simply can not draw a call, and the percent of infractions that are coincidental tripling from the first period, and doubling from the second period. What’s even stranger is that all of that increase to coincidental calls comes from the Canadiens’ share of infractions.
Overall in Canadiens games so far this season, first and second periods contain nearly exactly the same amount of infractions called per hour — 8.29 in the first period, 8.21 in the second period — while the whistles are put away a bit in the third with just 6.18 infractions called per hour. That’s a 25.1% drop in the third period overall, something that matches the eye test and likely isn’t unique to the Canadiens.
However, when you remove coincidental minors from each period, the Canadiens’ opponents see a 20% drop in power-play opportunities in the third period, while the Canadiens themselves see a 61.4% drop in power plays compared to the first two periods. Their share of power plays goes from 51.2% in the first period to 50.6% in the second, down to just 33% in the third.
I went one step further and split the third period up by game state as well, and the Canadiens’ share of power plays stayed relatively consistent in all three game states, shifting between getting 30% when tied up to 36.4% while leading.
However, things do get a little interesting when the Canadiens are trailing in the third period. In that situation, 50% of all infractions called while the Habs are trailing in the third are coincidental, a very significant aberration from other situations.
We’re dealing with very small samples here though, so keep that in mind. An outlier doesn’t signal intent.
Questions
Where do we go from here? The most obvious next step is to build another case study, breaking down another team like I have here for the Canadiens and compare them. Ideally, I’d collect this data for every team in the NHL so far, and go back into multiple seasons, but that would require some scraping. What I am going to do is put all this information in a publicly accessible Google sheet (here), so anyone can see how I formatted the data, calculations used, and if anyone wants to help they can either collect on their own or scrape the data for us all to pick through. This will also help finding any mistakes I may make along the way, hopefully!
Needless to say, I’m going to continue tracking Canadiens games this season myself and building out this database.
I would love to hear what questions I should dig into as I keep compiling the penalty data, but here are a few I’ve already decided to pursue in short order.
- How big is the shift normally in infractions when teams are leading or trailing in comparison to tied games?
- What is the average rate of infractions in the NHL by period?
- How consistent are these game management shifts in officiating across NHL teams?
- Do other teams experience such a startling shift in coincidental minors when trailing or in the third period?
There are also considerations we should investigate before accusations of team-driven bias.
- Young players seem to get less grace with drawing and taking penalties; the Canadiens are the youngest team in the league. How much does age correlate with penalty rate? Is this a significant factor in the Habs’ penalty differentials?
- How much does size influence the ability to draw calls? The Canadiens are seen as a small team, does that impact the results?
Other interesting notes
Whenever I dig into hockey data, I try to tease out a few notable things that I didn’t know beforehand, even if they might not be relevant.
- The Canadiens have drawn 25 roughing calls and taken 26. Of those 51 infractions, 39 were coincidental. That feels like a lot, nearly 80%, but I’m going to find out if it’s normal.
- 50% of Josh Anderson’s drawn penalties are coincidental minors; 54% of his own penalties are also coincidental minors.
- The Habs are relatively even in their share of ‘physical’ penalties (roughing, cross checking, boarding, instigator, checks to the head) and ‘stickwork’ penalties (tripping, hooking, high sticking, slashing, and cross checking). They get 45.7% of the calls with physical penalties, and 46.5% of the calls with stickwork penalties.
- Meanwhile, penalties more related to positioning and speed (tripping, hooking, holding, interference, and holding the stick) are to the Canadiens’ advantage. The Habs get 52.9% of those calls.
An aside
I’m not saying that the Habs are getting screwed this season; one team’s data isn’t anywhere close to enough to draw conclusions. However, if I wanted to lean on a team punitively, increasing how many of the penalties they draw end in coincidental minors in the third period or while trailing in games would be a savvy way of doing so without making it explicit.
Anyone who has watched the Canadiens regularly this season has likely felt that the Habs can’t get a break when they’re behind, and that third periods especially seem power-play free. Those feelings fit with the facts on the ground, we just can’t conclude that it’s targeted. Yet, at least. Let’s keep digging.
Andrew Berkshire is the former managing editor of Eyes on the Prize, and the founder of Game Over Network Inc. A Canadian, employee-owned sports media startup focused on platforming young creators across the country. Find Andrew live on YouTube after Habs games with Game Over Montreal, where you can also find Marc Dumont, Kay Imam, and Conor Tomalty to bring you interactive postgame analysis. You can join the Game Over Network’s Discord, and support us on Patreon as we employ over 30 young sports journalists and analysts across Canada’s seven NHL markets.
Social Media links: [Bluesky] [TikTok] [Instagram] [Threads] [Facebook] [LinkedIn]
