Plus One

No one needs to tell any of us hockey fans that the game moves fast. Speed is one of hockey’s most endearing attributes. Ten skaters moving swiftly, weaving in and out and around and crashing and tumbling and hurtling. Then there are the two goaltenders. And the four officials. Plenty is always going on, and none of us can notice it all. Watching a hockey game is a challenge. No matter how many eyes you have.

In each of the 30 NHL buildings is a crew of men and women who are trained by the league to watch games and record for posterity several sets of data which are then pored over and analyzed by fans and media alike, often for years and years to come.

Goals, assists, points, penalty minutes, shots, saves. We can all see those events. Then there are the hits, the face-off wins and losses, takeaways, giveaways. And ice time. Many of those events are more subjective, and seeing how they’re judged and counted from building to building around the league shows just how subjective some of those numbers are.

Wednesday night’s post-game stat sheet shows that Caps newcomer Eric Belanger won just one of the nine face-offs he took in the game. Belanger doesn’t agree with the numbers. Neither does Boudreau.

“Bad stat-keeping,” declares Boudreau. “He won the first face-off [of the game] pure and they didn’t give it to him. So I’m wondering what they think. All around the league I am wondering about the stat guys anyway. We play games where we think it’s a physical game and next thing we know we’ve got six hits and the next team has eight hits. But we played in San Jose when we didn’t think much of the game and both teams had 40 hits.”

The on-ice reality and the post-game paper count of hits and face-off wins can vary wildly. And that will probably always be the case. Goals and assists are easier to get right, usually. But scoring changes are made and announced during games. Sometimes, someone in the media or a media relations person notices that a change should be made, and sometimes the game officials do so on their own after taking another look or two during a television timeout or an intermission.

Occasionally a goal or an assist will get changed after the fact, a day or so after the play in question. Usually, a player goes to his team’s media relations representative and says that he should’ve gotten a point on this goal or that goal. And on rarer occasions, players will go to the same media relations rep and say they didn’t touch a certain puck, and should not be getting credit for a certain goal or assist. A review is made, and if necessary, a subsequent statistical adjustment.

I remember a certain veteran who did touch a puck en route to the goal going and having the goal changed. Because he knew the kid who took the shot wasn’t long for the NHL and that it would be neat for him to get a goal during his brief stay.

In hockey parlance, the player who makes his case for being awarded a goal or assist with which he was not originally credited is known as a “chiseler,” and he can come in for some (not entirely) good-natured ribbing in the wake of his assertion. Which is all fun and funny, but also kind of too bad. Because the idea should be to get it right. Contracts and careers are constructed with such things, so they might as well be correct.

And that brings us to the case of John Carlson.

Carlson started the play that resulted in Washington’s first goal of Wednesday’s game, an even-strength goal from Alexander Semin at 2:24 of the first period. The Caps’ 20-year-old rookie blueliner was credited with a secondary assist on the play. He was not, however, credited with a plus-1 for the sequence. According to the official time-on-ice data, Carlson went off the ice at 2:22 and was replaced.

That happens sometimes. Guys legitimately get credit for assists while they’re parked on the bench.

When the first-period stat sheet was handed out, I noted that Carlson was even rather than plus-1 as I had assumed. And I knew that he had not been on the ice for the goal scored by Carolina’s Patrick Dwyer late in the first, so I checked. And saw that he had allegedly gone off at 2:22.

I then Tweeted something to that effect. Almost immediately thereafter, more than one person informed me that Carlson had been wronged. One even claimed to have a photo of Carlson in the post-goal celebration.

There are baseball players who can compute their batting averages before they round first base after a single up the middle. And there are hockey players who can tell you how many face-offs they won (or believe they won) without looking at the post-game stat sheet. But almost every guy looks at that post-game stat sheet. They want to see how much ice they got; how many hits they got credited with. They also want to see that the official account of the game was generally close to what actually happened out there.

I’ve seen guys look at the sheet, and then go running after (Caps media relations mavens) Nate Ewell or Paul Rovnak claiming to have been wronged. And I’ve seen things subsequently get fixed from those conversations.

If a fan had a shot of Carlson on the ice, I figured one of photos snapped by one of the game photographers might have it, too. Sure enough, the evidence is there. The off-ice officials made a mistake, it happens. Players change on the fly all the time and sometimes the wrong uniform number gets called out upstairs and/or the data is entered wrong. It’s a difficult and exacting task, and for the most part the off-ice officials do a great job.

Hockey is a game of mistakes. Players make them. Coaches make them. Officials make them. However, nothing can be done about those after the fact.

Nate says the wheels of justice are in motion to credit Carlson and defense partner Shaone Morrisonn with the plus-1 that was erroneously given to Tom Poti and Joe Corvo on the play.

Today, John Carlson is plus-8 in a dozen games with the Caps this season. Keep an eye out. He could be plus-9 by game time on Friday.