February 7, 2007

Huselius Diving

There’s another triple threat player in the diving mix, Huselius now has three [1, 2, 3] diving calls against him, however all this appear mute as Hockey Operations disagrees with most of the on ice officials diving calls. When a dive (or unsportsmanlike conduct) occurs Hockey Operations takes over to determine the appropriate action:

In addition to the minor penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct/diving that may be assessed by the Referee during a game, Hockey Operations will review game videos and assess fines to players who dive or embellish a fall or a reaction, or who feigns injury in an attempt to draw penalties. (NHL.com)


Avery is the only individual who has received a public $1000 fine (and did not receive the $2000 fine on his third dive), the rest of the players may have been fined privately, but that would be unfair and strange for the NHL. Interestingly, Huselius, Chara, Plekanec, Selanne, Selanne, Hinote, Forsberg and Armstrong all should have received fines of $1000 if the NHL agreed with the on ice officials. If you use this information you can estimate the agreement level. For example I’m 95% confident that the NHL is disagreeing at or above 65% of the time and 66% confident that the number is as high as 80% based on these numbers. Considering there has 87 diving calls (62 of which included a hook, hold or a trip to the other team). If as I say: the NHL is only agreeing about one third of the time, that leaves us with about 29 legitimate diving calls this year (and that’s an upper bound).

The proverbial slap on the wrist will never rid the NHL of diving, but as I said before the NHL likes diving as it increases power plays and power plays increase goals and the current management believes that only goals make for good entertainment. It's no surprise they deal with diving the way they do: a lot of pretty ideas on paper with no action.

P.S.
I posted a diving update last month that showed diving calls had fallen from 0.12/game to 0.06/game, however the next 100 games it has gone back to the 0.12/game level as there were 12 diving calls for games 700-799. Either the drop over games 500-699 was due to random variations or the NHL reads this site...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The NHL does not read HockeyNumbers.

Anonymous said...

What I don't get is why the officials call the diving penalty and the other penalty at the same time, in effect negating the man-advantages. I watched pretty much all the Flames games, and Huselius' diving penalties were the case of a legitimate penalty to the other team, but because Huselius has a reputation, he also gets the penalty!