Ah.  The hot mic strikes again.

This happened in a  recent Nashville/Detroit game.  The ref in question said he wanted to give Nashville a make-up penalty for a bad call against Detroit earlier in the game.

Maybe if you’re a mic’d up ref, you shouldn’t express how you wanted to call a penalty against a team earlier in the game, changing how you ref the rest of the game.

“It wasn’t much but I wanted to get a fuckin’ penalty against Nashville early in the…”#Preds #LGRW pic.twitter.com/6fZImkdqLr

— Matt Best (@bestofmatt) March 24, 2021

We know make-up calls happen. Announcers and play-by-play guys talk about it all the time. It’s just unsettling for the game when you hear a ref talk about making phantom calls on purpose. The NHL is investigating and Hockey Twitter is on fire as to whether or not this is even ‘a thing’.

The NHL has an issue on their hands no matter your personal opinion.  Any ref knows they can’t influence the game and that’s exactly what we think when we hear a ref talk about handing out phantom penalties.  Context and history don’t matter in 2021 so butt-hurt Preds fans and right-fighters everywhere will take issue with fairness in their narratives.

Make-up calls are a way for referees to make bad calls right and even out their officiating. You’ll see make-up calls after refs call a bad penalty.  They try to right their mistakes by making other mistakes, in an attempt to even the playing field.  It’s been part of the game for over 100 years but that may change after this ref forgot he was mic’d up.

DB