![]() Maybe he’s truly a top-five guy who’s constantly being held back by a miserable franchise. It’s Buffalo, so everyone is having a bad year, and it’s hard to separate team results from that team’s best player. (When we did our everything draft in the offseason, Eichel was the ninth player and fifth center taken.)Īll that said, I think it’s fair to point out that Eichel is having a bad year. If you reset the league and held a draft today, he goes ahead of anyone who’s already over 30, which moves him up your list. That’s reasonable, because that’s as far as most GMs are ever looking, but we have to factor in that Eichel is still just 24 and has a lot of runway left. That’s… a pretty valuable player, right? An elite center is pretty much the most important piece an NHL contender can have, and Eichel’s at least in the conversation.Īnd that’s if we’re only looking at your timeline of the next three years. So we end up with Eichel being a guy who’s likely somewhere in the back half of the top ten, maybe just outside it if you want to be negative, maybe borderline top five if you want the glass to be half full. (Also, I’m going to choose to believe that Michael left the Bruins off his list just because he’s trying to make Jack Edwards cry, and the Canucks because he wants to see my car set on fire.) The rest are varying degrees of borderline. The Predators, unimpeded by the call, went on to win, 2-0.First things first, from your list of teams I think the only ones where you absolutely put the top center ahead of Eichel without even thinking about it would be Edmonton, Colorado, Toronto and probably still Pittsburgh. Of note, Kelly Sutherland was the other referee in this game. The league is likely going to have to come out with some other kind of statement/plan that they’ll be working with all officials to get things like this out of the game, but it’ll likely be little more than lip service. They’ll make mistakes, make-up calls, “screw you” calls, etc. How do you fix it? Who knows? Referees are human. It’s hard to believe that he went rogue all this time making these intentional calls on his own, and it’s more likely that it’s a league-wide problem. However, the guy has officiated nearly 1,500 NHL games over the course of his career. To be clear, Peel wasn’t exactly the most beloved official in the league prior to this incident, and he has to take responsibility for making the call and the comments. (Though to be fair, it’s also hard to call him a “fall guy” when he’s basically just dealing with the consequences of his own actions.) ![]() In absolutely no way is Tim Peel the only referee who has ever made a “stick it to them” penalty call, but he ends up being the public fall guy here. It can happen for any number of reasons: maybe they realize at an intermission that they missed a previous call, or maybe a player has repeatedly ignored their requests to not do XYZ. Everyone knows refs will, from time to time, go around looking for make-up/intentional calls. What’s interesting about all of this is that we all know that this is in no way an isolated incident. However, the punishment isn’t as harsh as the league would like you to think: per Elliotte Friedman, Peel was already planning to retire a month from now. The league apparently agrees: it announced this morning that Peel will no longer work any NHL games, effective immediately. Clearly he didn’t know the Nashville broadcast feed would pick up that audio, but it’s a wild thing to say after making a penalty call. We all know make-up calls are a thing, but what was stunning about this was to just hear it said so plainly by the ref. Prior to that call, there had been only one other penalty, an interference call against Adam Erne of the Red Wings. That’s the voice of referee Tim Peel, the one who made the call, admitting that there “wasn’t much” to call but that he just wanted to call something against Nashville. ![]() "It wasn't much but I wanted to get a fuckin' penalty against Nashville early in the." #Preds #LGRW /6fZImkdqLr- Matt Best March 24, 2021 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. ![]()
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