Zero Tolerance

When the NHL announced that they were finally going to start to call penalties that were already in the rulebook, I thought that I found a rare good change. Once I saw the implementation, I wanted to go back to the pre-lockout approach.

The biggest problem with zero tolerance is that they shifted the benefit of the doubt from the player committing the penalty to the player who goes down. This increased the rewards for diving, and diving got out of hand in a hurry. The problem is, what’s a dive? It’s not always easy to tell. There is no doubt that some plays resulting in diving calls have not been correct. The dives that get rewarded are frequently undeniable (Tim Thomas in the finals comes to mind). Officials are completely clueless and inconsistent in calling diving penalties, and diving could be viewed as crapshoot penalties (crapshoot penalties will be covered in another post).

The way that penalties used to be called, the officials had to be confident that the player was legitimately taken down. Yes, some dives were still being rewarded. Wayne Gretzky developed a style of falling on contact that was frequently rewarded. In most cases, however, the dives did nothing more than put the player going down out of position. That was discouragement enough for most players.

The bottom line here is that I would much rather seen missed calls when players are legitimately taken down than phantom calls every time a player proves to have horrible balance. Zero tolerance improved the scoring by increasing the number of power plays and crippling the defense (remember that dives can result in touching penalties). It also did significant damage to the entertainment value of the sport. I’m ready to go back to the way things were before zero tolerance.