Oilers Power Through A Bad Call To Hand The Ducks Their 5th Straight Loss

Added on Nov 22, 2010 by J Merrill in

NHL

The Oilers, who blew a 3-0 lead in a 4-3 shootout loss to Phoenix on Friday night, must have been having flashbacks during the Anaheim game. The Oilers eventually pulled out the win, but not before blowing a two goal lead because of a bad call.

In the second, Oilers’ Sam Gagne and Taylor Hall scored 1:41 apart in the second period and Penner had two assists against his former team, helping Edmonton win for only the third time in its last 17 games.

The Ducks Bobby Ryan scored a power-play goal just 8 seconds after an unjust delay-of-game penalty veteran referee Stephen Walkom called against rookie Theo Peckham, and teammate Saku Koivu scored 22 seconds later to tie it.

Peckham was clearing the puck out of his zone, and the puck left the ice. Walkom called the play as a delay of game, and said it went over the glass. However, the replay shows the puck leaving through the glass. There are holes in a few panels of the glass so that photographers can get clear shots of the players, and the puck left the ice through one of those holes.

“Momentum swings all the time during games, and sometimes it’s hard to come back from that,” defenseman Tom Gilbert said. “Refs make mistakes sometimes, and you’ve just got to work through it. We came in here between the second and third periods and we just told ourselves to continue what we were doing, keep pressing them, and the puck was going to go in the net for us. And that’s how it turned out.”

Peckham was just noticing the holes in the glass earlier in the night. Peckham said “It’s funny. I was skating around in warm-ups and I was looking at one of those holes and I was telling someone: ‘Hey, don’t pucks ever go through these holes?’ And sure enough, I got 2 minutes for delay of game, and I was seeing red. I was sitting in the penalty box and thinking back to the warm ups. And after I calmed down, I thought it was pretty ironic.”

Bob Hall, NHL senior officiating manager had tis to say, “It is not a reviewable play. Our video review process doesn’t allow us to do stuff like that. What happened in real time on the ice was the puck went out of play. The referee that was right in the corner didn’t see how it left the ice. He went and conferred with two of the other officials on the ice. They put the pieces of the puzzle together and they came out with it was shot out — which we all know now in seeing it on the replay that it was not the correct call.”

Luckily for the Oilers, Hemsky beat Jonas Hiller high to the stick side from close range for his sixth goal after getting the puck in the right circle from Dustin Penner and speeding past Anaheim defenseman Toni Lydman.

The frustrating thing for the Ducks is the shots on goal stats. The Ducks have taken 90 shots on net in their last two games and have two regulation losses to show for it.”It doesn’t really matter how many you get on net. It matters how many you get behind them,” Anaheim defenseman Andy Sutton said. “We have to focus on getting better traffic, some screens in front and maybe some better shots, too.”

Anaheim will play the Blackhawks on Friday, and the Oilers will be playing Phoenix on Tuesday.