Hockey East apologizes to Boston College staff for blown call at Beanpot consolation

Well, here’s an interesting nugget shared by Jeff Cox tonight on Twitter:

Interesting. In case you missed it, David Cotton scored a goal with just over one minute to play in Monday’s consolation game that would have given BC a 3-2 lead. The goal was awarded on the ice, but upon video review, the call was reversed and the goal waved off. Less than 20 seconds later, Northeastern scored down the other end to sink the Eagles and give them a huge blow in the Pairwise rankings.

I’m not going to opine on the call since no video has been made available postgame. I saw it live and saw it once on the jumbotron, and it looked like a 50/50 call that could have gone either way; it looked to me like Colin White was pushed in to Ryan Ruck, though the collision did prevent the goaltender from making a play.

Two things I can opine on, however:

1. It’s no secret that the quality of officiating in Hockey East has been poor for years - particularly on video reviews. For a call to be reversed on video review that was so bad, it prompted a league apology, is a pretty poor statement on the quality of officiating in the game. I feel like Hockey East officiating has gotten better over the past two seasons with an infusion of new officials, but there’s still a long way to go.
2. The really interesting thing to me: Hockey East seems to react positively when coaches rip their officials in public. There is no shortage of bad calls on a week to week basis, but there is a shortage of acknowledgement.
   
   Parker got away with shredding the refs for years, and it’s hard to forget Jeff Jackson whining about calls during the BC-ND playoff series in 2014 and being rewarded with some terrible calls in his favor in Game 3 of that series. UMass got an apology after officials made the correct call but were technically not supposed to be allowed to review it, after a major blowup.
   
   Jerry York rarely opens his mouth publicly about officials. Coincidence or not, and fair or not, it’s also a fact that BC has been on the wrong end of significant disparities in penalty minutes every year for the past few seasons.
   
   York expresses his displeasure publicly, and gets an apology? We’ll see if this leads to any impact in the way the games are officiated moving forward. I’m not saying that would be right - but frankly, past history suggests that could well happen. Public pressure seems to make an impact. Well, unless you’re Jim Madigan.

Anyway:

The damage has been done - that loss put a serious dent in BC’s tournament push. They’ll need to shake it off (oh oh, shake it off) quickly on Friday as a huge series against Vermont gets underway.