Quote:
Originally Posted by Street Pharmacist
Your ignoring the most obvious answer. Subconscious bias is inherent in all of us. Refs are human. Read what Kerry Fraser wrote about Don Shoenfeld. It happens all the time. You honestly don't think Burrows stopped getting the benefit of the doubt?
|
Oh, I totally agree there were probably a few borderline calls that didn't go our way due to the whole incident. I just don't think it's a league-wide conspiracy (meaning all the refs are in on it) and it justifies complaining about it in every gameday thread and becoming a national hockey topic on sports shows.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fighting Banana Slug
Edit: And I am not much of a conspiracy theorist either. The article also concedes that there could be some other reason outside of bias, and is open to suggestion as to the statistical variation. Do you have any other suggestions?
|
I think there are many factors at play, in addition to the few extra borderline calls going against us...such as a new coaching system, being in more competitive games, more minutes to tougher guys (Bennett, Tkachuk, Brouwer), and less minutes to softer players (Hudler, Colbourne). As for the immediate spike right after the Wideman incident, there were a couple outlier games shortly thereafter (16 times on the PK in 2 nights) that would have swayed the data whether there was an incident or not. So worst case scenario, if you reviewed the tape and disagreed with all those calls, you could point to those 2 specific group of refs taking it out on the Flames...but it's misleading to group those games in with all the others to bump up the average and claim it was something that lasted the rest of the season.
[QUOTE=Woops: Apparently deleted my initial point which was: The article indicated that the league saw a drop in penalties called when the Flames numbers went up. What do did you mean about the article mentioning that other teams had the same number of penalties called?[/QUOTE]
I'm mentioning how the graphs are pretty much identical curves for penalties drawn pre/post Wideman incident. They don't give the numbers or mention anything about this but it's pretty fair to say there's no significant difference in penalties drawn.