Brutal dive leads to an even worse call from NHL officials.

The 2017 - 2018 National Hockey League regular season featured some of the worst officiating I have seen in my lifetime and it marked perhaps the worst loss of trust in NHL officiating I have seen in a single season among the NHL fan base. Hopefully that will not be the case once again in the 2018 - 2019 NHL regular season but on Saturday night, just a few days into the season, we got a particularly ugly call from the NHL officials on the ice. 

The Buffalo Sabres are facing off against the New York Rangers on Saturday night and given the current state of both organizations it wasn't seen as a particularly interesting game on the schedule. The start of the game largely lived up to the expectations that you would have set up before tuning in to the game but an incident in the first period turned that on it's head pretty quickly. 

The Buffalo Sabres obviously expect forward Jeff Skinner, who was acquired in a big trade with the Carolina Hurricanes, to be a big contributor for them this season and he lived up to those expectations on Saturday, although not in the fashion the Sabres likely expected. Skinner had a huge impact in the first period when he turned what should have almost certainly been a penalty for the Sabres into a man advantage for the Sabres with a very well timed, and a very deceptive dive. 

Rangers veteran Chris Kreider appeared to have won a puck battle against Skinner in the first period using his superior mass and strength to gain position on the Sabres forward, but Skinner was not about to take that lying down, or maybe he was. Instead of simply letting Kreider blow past him Skinner decided that he would drag Kreider down to the ice, which he did, but he did so in a fashion that completely fooled the NHL officials on the ice overseeing the game. 

In the video replay Skinner can be seen tightly latching onto Kreider's arm and dropping the full weight of his own body back in an attempt to bring the bigger man down. Skinner not only succeeded in doing so but also managed to bring Kreider down on top of him in such a manner that it convinced the NHL officials on the ice that Kreider needed to go to the box for holding. It was a text book example of an NHL official calling a penalty on a play he clearly did not see, and instead calling the penalty based on the end result of the interaction as he perceived it at the time. 

The Rangers were not only denied a power play opportunity that they by all rights deserved to get but Kreider, one of the Rangers top players, was sent to the penalty box for two minutes for having been interfered with. Unfortunately for the Rangers things only got worse from there. The ensuing power play for the Sabres would result in a goal just minutes later from Buffalo's Conor Sheary and the Sabres were off to the races.

Hopefully we don't see too many more calls like this during the season.

[pub]