League executive believes Oilers, opponents will be on ‘high alert’ for how games are officiated

The three-game ban of Connor McDavid for his cross-check to the side of Conor Garland’s head has stirred up conversation all around the league.

Edmonton Oilers fans and pundits have dug their trenches in on one side of the equation, expressing displeasure not over the fact he faced supplemental discipline, but rather opening conversations about how star players are treated in the NHL versus other sports.

Vancouver Canucks fans and pundits, meanwhile, have dug into the belief that Garland is going to be “public enemy number one” tonight when these two teams square up for the third and final time this season.

Players around the league are talking about officiating, and McDavid spoke out Wednesday about how he wants to see the rulebook called as it is. Surely there have been more conversations around the league in front offices everywhere, and Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman shared a thought from one league executive in a 32 Thoughts column late Wednesday night.

I was talking with another executive who said the Oilers and their opponents will be on high alert for how games are called in the aftermath. Do the Oilers get more power plays? Is there any bias against them? Teams worry about overcompensation. The situations are not comparable, but Calgary’s penalty count went from 30th to fourth after Dennis Wideman high-sticked a linesman in 2016. So the paranoia exists.

Could this be the case? The Oilers played their first of three McDavid-less games on Tuesday welcoming the Washington Capitals to town, and beyond fans being displeased over a Ty Emberson penalty for knocking Andrew Mangiapane’s helmet off, there wasn’t much to complain about.

There’s some precedent for teams being retaliated against in the case of the Calgary Flames and Dennis Wideman, even though — as Friedman alluded to — came in very different circumstances. In 47 games that season before Wideman hit linesman Don Henderson from behind, the Flames were the most disciplined team in the league, taking 111 penalties, and finding themselves shorthanded just 2.4 times per game. In the Flames’ 35 games after, they took the third most penalties, 122, finding themselves shorthanded 3.5 times per game.

The Oilers have been one of the league’s most disciplined teams prior to Tuesday’s game against Washington, shorthanded just 2.3 times per game, the eight-fewest in the league. Edmonton was issued three minor penalties in their game against the Capitals, so it’s not as if there was a significant jump or anything like that right away.

Wideman was suspended for 20 games for his hit on Henderson, though an independent arbitrator reduced it to 10 games later, and the Flames saw a near-instant uptick in their penalties, as FlamesNation highlighted at the time.

Again, different situations, but the executive’s comments are interesting, nonetheless. It’s not just about the potential of retribution against the Oilers, given the team’s vocal displeasure of the incident and what McDavid has to put up with — with head coach Kris Knoblauch critical after the game, Corey Perry and Leon Drasiatl speaking out in recent days, and even the Oilers organization putting out a statement.

The Oilers have seen an average of just four minutes and four seconds on the power play this season, the fourth-fewest in the entire NHL. In 2023-24, they saw 4:26 per game, the second-fewest, while the 2022-23 season saw them at 4:56 per game, the 19th-most. That’s a noticeable decrease in each of the last three seasons, and McDavid feels it.

“It feels like as a team we’re drawing less,” McDavid said Wednesday. “I’m sure the numbers would say that too, but just from the eye test or the feel test, it feels like our team struggles to get power plays.

“We get maybe two a night, maybe less. I definitely notice that this year. Is that an indication of how much we’re attacking? It feels like we’re attacking a lot, we certainly have the puck a lot. We attack the net a lot, I think we average the second most shots a game, so we’re obviously going at the net a lot. We have it a lot, you’d think that would result in more penalties drawn, but for whatever reason it’s not. We’ll just keep plugging away. Nothing we can do about it.”

Comments like these from McDavid don’t just fall on deaf ears. He is, after all, one of the league’s poster boys, and as the best player in the world, his words have weight.

Time will tell what will come of it.