![]() ![]() Peel said he went over to Barry Trotz after the call, explained it, and the coach, having seen this episode before, said he understood. Peel admits it was a call he wouldn’t have made in a 1-1 game, and wouldn’t have made without knowing that the NHL wants this penalty for the sake of "game management," in order to ensure a 4-0 game between two rivals doesn’t get out of hand. My concern was that it was going to be an evening of him defending each criticism I’ve given him through the years instead, it was an acknowledgment that he screws up sometimes, and screws up grandly.Ĭase in point: The Sami Vatanen diving call. He has a level of self-evaluation that’s impressive, although I wished I had asked if it was influenced at all by the public scorn he deals with. Here’s what I learned about Tim Peel in 90 minutes on two bar stools: He knows who he is. The kind of nice the precedes a broken bottle and him gutting me like a trout in the middle of a Manhattan sports bar.īut instead we were toasting shots of tequila while glancing at the Wild and Flames on the television two hockey guys, talking hockey. He was just so god-damned nice to someone that picked apart his failures and helped turn “Tim Peel Alert” into Twitter shorthand for “what’s going to get screwed up tonight?” He was, like too nice. ![]() If it doesn’t lead to cringe-worthy confrontations, it will lead to some level of greater understanding about each other, which is always productive. ![]() Me? Well, I love dealing with those I criticize and those who are critical of me. A chance to see the human behind the zebra sweater, clear the air, all that. I know this was part of the message he wanted to convey to me, having tried to set up a meeting on a few previous occasions. It was at that point, he tells me, when he realized that there was this permanent stigma attached to his name that when his two young children are old enough, that they’ll search out their dad on the Internet and this is what they’ll find. ![]() But it wasn’t so much that as the headline that got to him: “Tim Peel is an Olympic referee what’s Russian for ‘blown call’?” 2013, and our response was to publish a laundry list of his mistakes in the NHL. It was when he was named to officiate the Sochi Olympics hockey tournament in Dec. There’s no question this helped push Peel as the poster-boy for NHL officiating incompetence, although we’d argue he was already in that spotlight when we intensified it.Īnyway, here’s Peel, beer in hand, explaining that for all the derision, all the criticism, there was one thing that really hurt. We’d show his blown calls and bad judgment, and assess it with a banana peel score, like a star scale. That was followed by “The Continuing Adventures of Tim Peel” and so on. 2013, which is when “The Adventures of Tim Peel, Terrible NHL Referee” debuted. We had written about him regularly since around Dec. The advent of social media in hockey fandom led to a cottage industry of “Tim Peel Alerts” when he was scheduled to officiate the game. The criticism of his many mishaps tracks back to 2008 on the venerable Kukla’s Korner. We were aware of Tim Peel well before his foibles became a department on this website. He’s affable, engaging, the kind of guy who gives you a tap on the knee before hitting a punchline in that “you’re going to want to hear this one” way.Īnd he’s sitting across from a guy who’s ridden his ass like a jockey for the last two years. He’s between games, having officiated in Washington the night before and headed over to New Jersey on Friday night. NHL referee Tim Peel and I are at Foley’s pub in New York, which is the only logical place for a hockey summit. ![]()
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