The NHL officiating may at times be an embarrassment, but that article is equally embarrassing. Pure editorial opinion and almost no actual reporting. Well done.
The clip he puts in as "evidence" of missed calls are is a play that was unfortunate. There was the "knee" by Demelo on McDavid. Except Demelo turns his body to the side and McDavid leaps to avoid him and his leg gets caught. It's unfortunate incidental contact, and not a penalty because all Demelo did was step up into McDavid's ice. Is this one of those "right of way" penalties again?
Then he says "he only is 21st in penalties drawn per 60 behind players like Derek Ryan and Ryan Lomberg". Well yeah, Dom. It's a per 60 stat. McDavid plays like 30 minutes a game and those other guys play like 10, but they're aggressive on the forecheck and draw a fair share of penalties. Besides, 21st for a player like McDavid with his ice time isn't anything to get upset about. Next.
Then he tries to apply a data set of 1182 shifts to 121, so like 1% of the original data set. Even in the original data set he says McDavid had a 2.5% chance of drawing a penalty on a shift, but didn't draw one once in the smaller sample, which only had a 5% chance on a "normal distribution". Yeah, Dom. That's what happens when you have limited data sets, you get strange outliers and that means you cannot and should not draw any conclusions from it. Instead of acknowledging that it's random chance, he says it cannot be random and it's intentional. Then does the same process based on 4 games last year and somehow is shocked that a small data set again with small odds of an event occurring in the first place leads to shockingly weird outlier data.
Holy ####, get this guy a stats class ASAP. This is poor mathematical reasoning through and through.
Then he gets into the culture of playoff hockey where fewer penalties are called overall, but not really. I've been watching a series between the Panthers and Lightning, and they're calling the penalties that are dangerous and affect the play, as well as managing the emotions and violence by calling retaliatory plays. If you over officiate the playoff games, the players are taken out of the equation and it becomes a game of special teams. You may as well have a shootout at that point.
He goes on to mention 5 obvious "missed calls" in overtime after the Yamamoto penalty, but doesn't show a clip or describe what he considered a missed call, so again, sounds like opinion rather than fact to me.
Then there's this part which I simply find ridiculous:
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And that’s not on the referees either. They’re not bad at their jobs, they’re quite good at fulfilling their mandate and doing what’s asked of them. All of this is by design because this, for whatever reason, is what the league wants.
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So yeah, the league who makes bank by having hugely marketable stars do well in the playoffs is intentionally telling referees to let the grinders have their way on McDavid? Puh-lease. Think about that sentence just for a second and tell me if it makes any sense.
But here's the thing that Dom never really gets, it happens for both teams, so the standard is the same. It's not like the Jets do not have a single player that doesn't get held, hooked, or impeded in some way. Do non-calls on Nik Ehlers deserve a special look? Nah, because he isn't the game's biggest marketable star.
To me, this is someone trying to rationalize how a great regular season player like McDavid could look so ordinary in the playoffs. It's a hack job article, and if I were the editor, I wouldn't have published it. Poor reasoning, specious evidence, confirmation bias, and a made up narrative without anything credible to back it up. Awful journalism, and that's coming from someone who usually likes what Dom has to write.