Text size:

NHL: Refs made right calls

League supervisor of officials happy with refs' Game 3 performance

Jim Baumbach

11:11 AM EDT, April 17, 2007

After watching the Islanders fans' idiotic trashing-the-ice display and then hearing several players question the referee's calls after their 3-2 Game 3 loss, I got a little tired of the belly-aching.

The referees are always such an easy target for fans and players when things go sour, offering a convenient excuse not to look your team directly in the mirror and say we just screwed up.

Unfortunately, the referees weren't interested in talking to me. "They said they don't give interviews," one NHL official told me after relaying my request to the refs in their dressing room.

Too bad, I thought.

Jim Baumbach Bio | E-mail | Recent columns

I not only wanted to give these thankless guys a chance to explain their calls and tell their side of things, I also wanted to hear what it's like on the ice as the numbnuts try pelting you with beer.

Then, as fate would have it, a familiar name to Islanders fans walked out of the referee's locker room. It was none other than Leon Stickle, now a supervisor of officials for the league.

Surely you remember him as the linesman who blew an offsides call in Game 6 of the 1980 finals that directly resulted in an Isles goal, helping them win their first of four straight Stanley Cups. You know Flyers fans still hold a grudge over that one.

Stickle agreed to talk, but you're not going to like what he told me.

"I'm happy with the job that was done tonight," he said.

As part of his job, Stickle sits in the press box and focuses on the officials, watching every call (and non-call) live and then on the replay. He was a linesman for 27 years, so he knows penalties.

"I did that job for a long time, so I see things that could become a bone of contention and take a look at it," Stickle said. "Sometimes we're wrong, too. But not in these cases tonight."

The biggest complaint that the Islanders had was with the second-period double-minor called on defenseman Tom Poti for high sticking that combined with the slashing penalty charged to Marc-Andre Bergeron led to a 5-on-3 situation for the Sabres.

"Very questionable," Alexei Yashin said.

Stickle insisted otherwise.

"The unfortunate thing about that penalty is that the player is ultimately responsible for his stick, whether it's accidental or not," Stickle said. "It's a four-minute penalty, an automatic. He already had his arm up for the slashing penalty, and that happened after. Unfortunately, the player wasn't responsible for his stick."

The penalty that sent the fans into an inexplicable outrage was when Randy Robitaille was called for tripping with 1:34 left, right after an offensive drive to the goal when Islanders fans thought there should have been a penalty on the Sabres.

Stickle insisted the officials handled that sequence correctly, saying he watched it multiple times. "[Robitaille] put his stick under and pulled his leg out from under him," he said. "And the play they were talking about before that when the guy [Islanders defenseman Chris Campoli] went down the middle, he was never touched [by a Sabres player]."

Immediately after that came the ugly display from the fans, with beer, trash and who knows what else being thrown on the ice.

It took six Ice Girls and two equipment officials about five minutes to clean the mess. Good thing beer bottles are now plastic, because for all the bottles that made it onto the ice, there were so many others that hit unexpecting fans in the first few rows.

No one deserved that, not the refs and not the fans.

"You hope nobody gets hit with something that will hurt them," Stickle said, "because at the end of the day it's a game."

***

Jim Baumbach's column, which only appears on Newsday.com, is posted by noon Monday through Friday. He can be reached at jim.baumbach@newsday.com.