Sunrise, FL – In a landmark win for referee science, the team of Wes McCauley and Francis Charron have come up with a new way to help the Panthers win: physically blocking Oilers players in order to cause a turnover that led to a game swinging goal.
“For the past three years we’ve basically stuck to the classics. You know, ignoring too many men and obvious attempts to injure the opposing goaltender while calling soft crosschecks and hooking calls against the other team,” said McCauley. “But that was getting stale. And, I’m probably just being paranoid but it felt like people were starting to notice our bias a little bit?”
“That’s when the light bulb went off for Frankey and he said ‘what if we don’t just use our penalty signalling arms to control the game, but the rest of our bodies as well?'”
Charron waited for the perfect moment to put his theory to use. After the Oilers scored to make it 2-1 and had all the momentum, he positioned himself perfectly along the boards where Oilers defender Klingberg would be soon skating with the puck. As Klingberg approached Charron didn’t attempt to move out of the way at all, but stuck his leg out at the puck while looking away to ensure plausible deniability. Klingberg went down, the puck bounced away and was soon fired into the back of the net.
However Charron, humble as ever, was quick to deflect praise for this important breakthrough.
“I can’t take too much credit. I was watching highlights of the 2014 women’s gold medal game when the linesperson unintentionally hip checked the Canadian defender and I just thought: ‘what if that but on purpose?’ Anyone could have done the same.”
But they didn’t. And while the game will likely be remembered by hockey fans mostly for the beat down the Panthers gave the Oilers from that point on, for young referees it will be the moment everything changed.
“This opens up a world of possibilities,” said rookie Ryan McNally. “If we can find a few more ways to swing games to the team we favour, then maybe one day we could control who wins as much as NBA refs do,” he added with a huge smile on his face.
