In the NHL playoffs, finding the line — and sometimes crossing it — is half the battle

New York Times

15-05-2025

DALLAS — Vegas Golden Knights forward Tomáš Hertl went to the crease, as he's done countless times before. When his teammate Mark Stone had the puck behind the Edmonton Oilers net, Hertl knew exactly what was coming and what was expected of him. He planted himself at the top of Calvin Pickard's crease, got his stick on Stone's centering feed, and put it on net. Pickard stopped it. Referee Kelly Sutherland blew his whistle. The play was over.
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But Hertl's adventure was just beginning.
At this point, Edmonton's Darnell Nurse grabbed Hertl by the face with his left hand and wrapped his right arm around Hertl's shoulder. Adam Henrique — who had delivered a heck of a cross-check to Hertl's spine as he made his shot attempt, mind you — all but hopped on Hertl's back. Nurse and Henrique combined weigh a little more than 400 pounds, and they used all of it to drive Hertl down to the ice.
Face-first.
Yes, it hurt.
No, a penalty wasn't called.
'I mean, it's fine,' Hertl said a couple of days later. 'It's the playoffs.'
Once he finally peeled himself off the ice — it did take a few moments — Hertl jawed with an official as he skated back to the bench. But it's not as if he had much of a leg to stand on. You probably wouldn't feel too much empathy for the guy if you saw him do a full-blown Sumo shove on Minnesota's Ryan Hartman after winning a faceoff in the first round, then wrap and tackle Hartman like a linebacker, then ride him like a toboggan from the left circle to the low slot, only to have Stone bank a centering pass into the net off of him.
'It just looked bad because he fell down,' Hertl said with a shrug. 'I'm sure I did worse in the regular season.'
The difference: In the regular season, a penalty would probably be called. In the playoffs, who knows?
To a man, every player will tell you that Stanley Cup playoff games are more intense, more physical, more desperate than a nondescript game in January. Every slash is a little bit harder, every puck battle involves a little more holding, every hit comes a little bit closer to interference, every goalmouth scrum involves a half-dozen more cross-checks to the back, every post-whistle skirmish ends with shoves and facewashes and maybe even a few punches. Players are trying to rip sticks out of opponents' hands when the refs aren't looking, they're adding an extra shot or two after a hit along the boards, they're doing absolutely anything and everything they can to grind their opponents down. Everyone's inner Brad Marchand comes out in the playoffs.
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Everyone's looking for the slightest advantage, both physical and psychological.
And every official sees it all just a little bit differently.
So, how do you find that ever-moving, ever-blurring line between what you can get away with and what you can't? When one power play can decide a game — a series, even — how do you bend the rules and push the limits of legality without getting caught? And how do you hold the line if you're an official?
'I don't know the answer,' laughed Edmonton's Corey Perry, one of the game's all-time great postseason line-steppers. 'You know when they call that first penalty. That's kind of when you see what you're getting away with, what you're not. Each game brings a different element, (but) you just go out and play the same way. Who knows? It's hockey.'
Dave Jackson was ready. He had earned this opportunity, he deserved this opportunity. He had officiated plenty of regular-season games. And he had even served as a standby official for the playoffs for years. So when he got his first NHL playoff assignment, he was excited.
'Then I stepped on the other side of that glass,' Jackson said.
From that first puck drop, Jackson was astonished by the speed and intensity of a playoff game compared with a regular-season game. When you're watching from above, you understand it's faster, it's rougher, but until you're on the ice yourself amid all those bodies crashing into each other at maximum velocity, you can't truly grasp the chaos.
The way Jackson sees it, the refs aren't letting things go. They're just missing things. They're human, after all.
'It's ramped up exponentially,' said Jackson, a longtime NHL official who now serves as ESPN's rules expert. 'Things happen so fast that we can't (assume) that because something happens in front of the net that the referee decided that it was OK. It could be the fact that he simply missed it.'
Players aren't the only ones who want the players to decide the game. The last thing an official wants to do is directly affect the outcome of a game. And in the cold calculus of the playoffs, in that frenetic maelstrom of malevolence, it's better to miss a call than make the wrong one.
'Guys' heads are on a swivel, looking everywhere,' Jackson said. 'And if you only catch the tail end of a play, I'm a firm believer that, rather than guess and be wrong, it's better you miss the penalty. If you guess and you're wrong and you put a team on the power play for two minutes, I believe that to be more impactful than missing a hook or a hold. You can live with a missed call. If you call something that's blatantly not a penalty, that creates issues. You don't want guys guessing. So just because a call goes uncalled, it doesn't mean the referee is calling a game any differently.'
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In other words, when it comes to calling penalties, the standard remains the same. But the stakes are so much higher. The pressure is so extreme on the officials that Jackson developed coping mechanisms. He'd 'zone out' during the national anthems and start repeating a mantra in his head: 'Don't miss a penalty, and don't overreact to a penalty.' During stoppages in play, he'd repeat it to himself, and add things like, 'Work extra hard to get good sight-lines on every play, don't be lazy, move your feet, get in the right position.' He taught himself to wait an extra second to throw his arm up during the postseason, to give himself a moment to make sure he saw what he thought he saw.
He'd still miss or botch calls, of course. And just like a player replaying a flubbed scoring chance over and over in his head, those misses keep referees up at night, too. There are still two calls — Jackson won't say which, because he doesn't need to remind any fans of his foibles — that haunt him. Both were follow-throughs that he incorrectly identified as high-sticking penalties. Both cost the teams a power-play goal.
Despite all the spittle-spewing rants players direct at officials during games, the players really do understand this. It'll never ease the anger in the moment, but forgiveness comes more easily when things have quieted down.
'They have, like, the impossible job,' Henrique said. 'It's a thankless job. Nobody's ever happy, and it's always their fault. We always feel one way, they always feel the other way, and we always argue about it. Whether or not that does anything, well, I've never seen a guy argue a call and get it overturned because the ref says, 'You know what? You're right!' It's yet to be seen.'
Officials do give players a little leeway, though.
Henrique believes that the officials let more and more go as the playoffs go on — that first-round penalties aren't third-round penalties. And it makes sense, because as Winnipeg Jets forward Nino Niederreiter pointed out, the first round tends to be the most physical, as players are the most amped up before settling into the postseason grind.
But the numbers don't exactly bear that out. In the first round this spring, there was an average of 7.83 minor penalties called per game, according to Evolving Hockey. In the second round, it's a comparable 7.56. Last year, the first round saw 7.43 minors per game, with 8.0 in round two, an anomalous 5.67 in the conference final, and 8.29 in the Stanley Cup Final.
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But even players admit they're committing more penalties in the playoffs. It's just a matter of what gets called.
'Absolutely,' Niederreiter said. 'Because every single detail matters so much.'
'You know in your head if it's a penalty or not,' Henrique said. 'Whether it gets called or not, sometimes it's a different story.'
Officials swear they try to call every game the same, but watch any playoff game and you'll see the difference.
The obvious stick infractions — slashes, trips, hooks — still get called, but the rough stuff is typically let go. In Game 5 of the first round, Dallas Stars defenseman Lian Bichsel was rag-dolling Colorado forward Logan O'Connor all over the ice but wasn't penalized for any of it. Meanwhile, Stars forward Mikko Rantanen was called for a very soft tripping penalty in Game 3, even though Avalanche forward Valeri Nichushkin was falling on his own. In Game 2 of the second round, Bichsel was cross-checking Jets players left and right but was penalized only once, for a shot to Vladislav Namestnikov.
In Game 2 of the Oilers-Golden Knights series, Vegas defenseman Noah Hanifin delivered three straight cross-checks to Evander Kane's back. Kane wheeled and responded with a two-hander of his own. No penalty. In that same game, Kane ran into Vegas goalie Adin Hill and was pounced on by Zach Whitecloud, who lay on top of Kane and delivered a few punches while he was prone on the ice. No penalty. And again in that game, Perry got two minutes for a rather modest cross-check to Vegas' Reilly Smith — right after getting away with a much nastier one on William Karlsson. It can feel arbitrary sometimes. And sometimes the only way to find the line is to take it too far.
'The refs have the line,' Bichsel said. 'You just have to find out and challenge the refs a little bit, too. You have to be close to that line. You have to be patient, too. You can't just skate around and kill guys or destroy guys. You have to be patient, and when you have an opportunity, you take it.'
'I feel like the ref sets the tone at the beginning of the game, how far you can go,' Niederreiter said. 'It's up to him. The more he lets go, the more physical the game gets, the more scrums you get. You can tell early, 'OK, the refs are actually going to call some of this.' The ref decides how far you can go.'
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Every player knows the deal. While a clear trip will usually be called whether it's the first minute or last minute, the sneakier stuff, the rougher stuff, is less likely to be called in the third period or overtime. The judgment calls tend to be the first ones to go. Again, the officials do not want to decide the game, or worse, become the story.
'I don't want to be in their shoes,' Niederreiter said. 'It's like they can only lose.'
Players know officials, and officials know players, especially seven months into a season. If a player knows that night's referee tends to be a little looser, he'll adjust accordingly. If he's known for calling everything, a player might dial it back that night.
That door swings both ways, though: officials know exactly whom to keep an eye on, too. But familiarity can be helpful in another way. Some referees will issue unofficial warnings — maybe during a scrum, they'll yell at a player that he's about to get called for something, and the player will disengage. Or perhaps during a stoppage, a referee will swing by the bench and tell a player that if he pulls another stunt like the one he just did, he'll be headed for the penalty box.
'They do a good job of talking out there,' said Vegas defenseman Nicolas Hague, who took a five-minute major for cross-checking Edmonton's Trent Frederic in the face in Game 2. 'They kind of let you know. They'll let you know it was close back there, or that they'll be keeping an eye on certain stuff for the rest of the game. But listen, I think the refs have a tough job. Guys are playing hard, and the game moves quickly. They're going to make mistakes, same as us.'
The question that remains is simple: Is this good for the game? Is it good to have nebulous standards of right and wrong, a moral ambivalence in the biggest, most pressure-packed games of the season?
Well, yes and no.
Players always say that they just want consistency. But when a standard trip is called in the dying minutes of a tied playoff game, they're outraged. Players want leeway, but not when it's the other guy flouting the rules. When a player is tripped, he throws his arms up as if to say, 'Where's the call?!' When a player trips someone else, he throws his arms up as if to say, 'But I didn't do anything!'
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Asked if he likes the playoffs more physical and skirting that line, Hague said: 'Yeah, I like it. It's what makes the trophy so hard to win, right? It's a grind. You've got to go four series, and each one is its own little war. That's something you either shy away from or embrace.'
But when asked if officials should adjust their standards in the playoffs, if they should let players run around with impunity, Hague said: 'Not really, no. The rules are still the rules.'
Everyone wants it both ways.
'I think it should be a little more freewheeling out there,' Niederreiter said. 'But there does need to be a line.'
Where that line is depends on the referee and what he's willing to allow. But it also depends on the players and how far they're willing to go. There are countless other factors, including the situation, how late in a game it is, how late in a series it is and how late in the playoffs it is.
Finding that line is never easy, and the process of searching for it begins anew with each game. But finding it — skirting it, testing it and occasionally crossing it — is often the difference between moving on or going home.
'It is a fine line,' Henrique said. 'But it tends to be one that every team flirts with at some point. That's the playoffs.'
(Top photo of Tomáš Hertl: Candice Ward / Getty Images)