[Erick Estrada]

Originally Posted by Resolute 14

You know, "if it wasn't against your team you wouldn't have a problem" is one of the laziest, most intellectually dishonest arguments a person can make. Making such an argument, frankly, only calls you out as a someone not to be taken seriously.

What people wanted replay for was to get rid of blatant mistakes like this. What people did not want was to see the game slowed right down and goals taken away because two linesmen staring at a six inch screen think that a guy might have been offside by the width of a penis hair. What we ended up with (and so too did MLB, incidentally) was a solution worse than the problem it was meant to eliminate. And that is true whether or not it benefits or harms the Flames.


There's really three things to do to improve this:

-First, make it so the offside rule is that a player's body must be on the plane of the blue line, even if not touching it.

-Second, take the video monitors off the bench and severely restrict how much time a coach has to challenge. They shouldn't be allowed to deliberate first. If you think it was a bad call, signal the off-ice officials immediately, or too bad.

-Third, two minute delay of game penalty if you're wrong.

Combine these three, and the rule begins to function as it was intended: to catch and reverse blatant mistakes.

I don't think you can pick and choose what degree of offside is a worthy of calling a goal back. Offside is offside whether it be by an inch or two feet. It sucked seeing those goals called back but they were both technically offside. As you say they need to adjust the rules accordingly but those two goals were offside according to the rules so Flames fans really shouldn't be overly upset at the rules or challenge. It's on the players at the end of the day to ensure they are onside on a rush.

I don't agree though with a delay of game penalty though as you are penalizing coaches for challenging close plays. Personally I would just scrap the replay for offside as there's a reason the NFL and CFL don't use replay for false starts, offside, no-yards, etc as there are going to be plenty of instances in fast sports where there are going to be small error and trying to correct all of them would slow down the game and result in ticky tack penalties. We have seen a small number of really bad offside on-calls result in goals prior to the rule change but I don't know if it was really worth bringing this rule in that has resulted in plenty more goals taken off the score sheet due to inches or less. To me that's too much micromanagement especially in a league where offense is drying up.