One of the hottest items of debate all throughout the season was the newly introduced offside challenge, allowing coaches to ask for a video review of a goal to see if the opposing team carried the puck in onside. While in theory it makes sense—any goal scored because of a blown offside call can greatly swing the outcome of a game—in reality it became something of a circus. Referees were taking increasingly long periods to determine whether a player was on or offside, with things like skate blades barely touching the ice in dispute.
There were some who believed the challenges should be removed altogether, others who wanted the NHL to go to a sort of NFL endzone type plane that a player would have to break (as in, if any part of his body was above the blue line he would be considered onside) and still more that thought it was fine and just needed to have a limit in length of review. Instead, the NHL has decided to institute a new penalty for an incorrect challenge. According to Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet, if a coach challenges a goal and fails, his team will immediately be given a two-minute penalty.
It seems as though this will have one of two outcomes. Either coaches will avoid challenging plays entirely, afraid of putting their teams in an even worse hole, or they will delay the ensuing faceoff enough to get their own team to look at it before deciding to challenge. That’s the same problem the MLB faced when it instituted video review, eventually leading to another rule that made managers challenge within a certain period of time.
As we’ve reported before, the league will also remove the ability to call a timeout after an icing and will be cracking down on slashes to the hands and body. Last year saw many incidents where players were injured on a slash to the gloves, including when Sidney Crosby chopped off a piece of Marc Methot’s finger. How the league intends to further penalize these is still unclear.