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Team-Level Referee Discrimination in the National Hockey League

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Breaking the Ice

Part of the book series: Sports Economics, Management and Policy ((SEMP,volume 16))

Abstract

Previous research on referee discrimination in penalty calling has been based on relative comparisons across race/ethnic groups, and does not discern whether the findings are based on players of a different or the same race/ethnicity. This paper tests for team-level discrimination amongst professional hockey referees, and finds that French-Canadian referees favor teams, in the form of fewer penalty calls, that have more French-Canadian players. The analysis is undertaken at penalty level to account for additional within-game referee biases and varying costs of player infractions across score margin game states.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The majority of the literature examining discrimination in sports has focused on racial discrimination, and has examined the extent to which black players may suffer from discrimination at the hands of consumers (fans), team management, and/or co-workers (teammates). See Kahn (1991) for a summary of the discrimination literature based on professional sports labor markets.

  2. 2.

    Mongeon and Longley (2013) re-estimated Price and Wolfers (2010) game-player-level analysis to find that only black players were discriminated against.

  3. 3.

    http://www.nhl.com/ice/news.htm?id=559630

  4. 4.

    During the 2009–2010 NHL regular season, a discretionary penalty on average increased the net probability of an opposing team goal by 14.7 %. Assuming two teams are of equal ability, the expected scoring differential over any fixed period of time is zero when the teams are at equal strength. During the 2009–2010 season teams scored on the power-play an average of 18.2% of the time compared to 3.5% while short-handed. Therefore, the average cost of a penalty is 18.2%–3.5% = 14.7%.

  5. 5.

    See Longley (2012) for a discussion of discrimination in the NHL within the broader framework of French-English relations in Canada.

  6. 6.

    The book was originally released in French and called Le Quebec mis en echec.

  7. 7.

    The penalty level analysis is similar to the pitch level analysis conducted by Parsons et al. (2011) who tested for discrimination based on the relative probability of a strike compared to a ball rather than based on aggregated strike calling rates.

  8. 8.

    See Mongeon and Longely (2013) and Mongeon and Mittelhammer (2013) for the multi-stage estimation procedure to test for discrimination across discrete referee ethnic groups.

  9. 9.

    Including referee fixed effects in the penalty level analysis presented in this chapter would hold constant an individual referee’s bias across home and visiting penalty calls rather than preferences to call player infractions as penalties.

  10. 10.

    See also Balmer et al. (2001, 2003), Buraimo et al. (2010), Boyko et al. (2007), Dawson et al. (2007), Mohr and Larsen (1998), and Sutter and Kocher (2004) as well as Witt (2005) for evidence relating to home team biased officiating.

  11. 11.

    Garrett (2003) derived the theoretical conditions under which the magnitudes of the estimates and the standard errors can be different when the regression analysis uses aggregated versus disaggregated data.

  12. 12.

    Parsons et al. (2011) used the within-game information to test for discrimination amongst MLB umpires and controlled for pitch count in the empirical analysis.

  13. 13.

    Discretionary penalties are those that involve a judgment call on the part of the referee as whether to call, or not to call, a penalty. We consider the following penalties to be discretionary penalties: checking from behind, closing hand on puck, cross checking, delaying the game, diving, elbowing, holding, holding the stick, hooking, instigating, interference, interference on goalkeeper, slashing, and tripping. Henceforth, we refer to all discretionary penalties as, simply, penalties.

  14. 14.

    All data are available from NHL.com. The penalty data are obtained from the NHL’s play-by-play reports and the game summary reports to ascertain the names of the two referees that worked each game.

  15. 15.

    Goaltenders are rarely replaced during the course of a game and are, therefore, omitted from the analysis.

  16. 16.

    The two-sided indicator variables are equal to zero for the first and second penalties of the game.

  17. 17.

    Asterisks denoting levels of significance are not included in the table because the signs of the coefficients are in opposition to rejecting the null hypothesis of no discrimination.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sport Management, Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

    Kevin Mongeon

  2. Department of Sport Management, Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

    Neil Longley

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  1. Kevin Mongeon
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  2. Neil Longley
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Correspondence to Kevin Mongeon .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Management Department, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Bernd Frick

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Mongeon, K., Longley, N. (2017). Team-Level Referee Discrimination in the National Hockey League. In: Frick, B. (eds) Breaking the Ice. Sports Economics, Management and Policy, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67922-8_7

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