If you think the NHL has trouble figuring out what's a penalty and what isn't under the new standards of rules enforcement, just wait until you see an international game.
The NHL crackdown on hooking, holding and other offences is being implemented for international hockey tournaments as well. The early results are not promising.
The World Junior Hockey Championship is a mess, at least so far. With teams that have never played together before working under referees they might never have seen before, the result has been a steady stream of penalties, mass confusion among players and coaches, and very dull hockey games.
In the NHL, everyone has an 82-game regular season to sort out the new system before the playoffs begin. International hockey has no such luxury. The World Junior gold medal game is next Thursday.
The World Junior Championship draws little interest outside Canada. But there's a tournament coming up in February that has a slightly higher profile. If the international team of referees is not fully versed in the new game when the Olympics begin, hockey's greatest showcase will sink in frustration, confusion and spectacular embarrassment.
Comments
A couple of comments. I’m sure you don’t notice but you sound a bit ignorant in this text. That the J-WC draws little interest outside of Canada is only true if you mean the U.S. But there is more countries playing hockey in the world…
As for the ref’s in the tournament I’ll agree that the standard havent been the best. But to say that the games have been dull is to me completely wrong (Swedens games have been brilliant, in fact among the best games I have seen in a while.)
I agree that we need to implement a standard for referees in the world but the way you write it sounds like we should only have American/canadian referees in big tournaments. But is there only one side to this? Oh yeah icehockey is only played in Canada/USA… Forgot about that..