In Response to The LA Game: I'm Not Mad At The Refs, I'm Mad At The Refs

In case that title was confusing, let me clear this up for you... I'm not mad at the Referees because I believe they lost the game for your Detroit Red Wings, I'm mad at the Referees because of the blown calls and the idea that plays that can cause injury, or did cause injury, are not called.

Let's take the example of Dustin Penner's hit on Brendan Smith.

Smith does not have the puck and is obviously blindsided. Penner is a big body and can cause damage. The refs can claim that they didn't see this but if I'm a ref, I see someone down with the puck no where in the vicinity, I'm stopping play and investigating. To the Detroit Free Press, Smith says "It was more whiplash than anything." Whiplash is dangerous and is often linked with a concussion. I'm really hoping that Smith is okay and this isn't re-occuring. Not to mention that Smith is just coming back from an injury and if Penner doesn't hit Smith's head, he hits the same shoulder that Smith has just rehabbed.

Let's take the other example from last night's game, Dan Cleary gets high sticked by Jake Muzzin.

This is another time when an injury could have occurred, and did, but the referees did not call anything. MLive says that Cleary received 15 stitches around his orbital bone (eye) after either getting hit with a high stick by Jake Muzzin or being interfered with by Jake Muzzin. Not a penalty according to the refs from last night's game.

For a league that is so focused on letting fans, players, teams, and anyone who will listen, how tuned in to player safety they are, these are unacceptable. Anytime that a player has "whiplash" it can result in a concussion, the very thing that this league is (supposedly) most worried about. This has to end.

The league rulebook has a rule that says you cannot touch the puck off a face-off, Pavel Datsyuk was whistled for this yesterday. Okay, it's frustrating that it was called when the team was already killing a penalty and the Kings scored but, it's in the rule book -- it should be called. Just like interference and high sticking are in the rule book but were not called yesterday. What frustrates me most is that plays that can, and do, injure players are let go but if a player touches the puck off a FO, so help us all.

All I'm saying, in this long winded rant, is that if a ref is going to call a face-off violation, with pretty much no possibility of injury, they need to call plays that can injure opposing players and those on the player's team as well.