Hours Of Penalties

The Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning are bitter rivals.

The Panthers are also what is known as a dirty team and The Lightning are generally regarded as one of the cleaner teams (no not cleanest by a long stretch.)

They played each other in two back to back pre-season games and managed to rack up almost seven hours of penalty minutes in two hours of play time.

In case you don't know hockey, most penalties are two minutes long.  Some are longer.

But this was in the neighborhood of 200 penalties in two games, with 3/4 of them in the second game.  At times there were more players in the penalty box than on the bench OR the ice.

That they were called relatively evenly makes me think a change in officiating has taken place since last season where The Panthers could commit offenses with, seeming, impunity.  I also think that the Lightning coaches said, "fuck it, hurt 'em, we're going to get penalized like a motherfucker anyway, so let's fuck Mom!"

I hope that it's a real change in officiating.

If you're going to call it, call it.  If you're going to ignore it, ignore it.  But don't let one team get away with it while being all Karen on the other.