It takes place in Sunrise, Florida. A sixth game in the first round of the playoffs, in the second period, it’s 2–2 between the Bruins and the Panthers. Since they evened the score, the Bruins have been on a roll, and now they score and find themselves ahead for the first time of the evening. But not so fast…
Panthers challenge. The referee checks the video. Who shows this: Jake DeBrusk, of the Bruins, who fell on the ice and dropped his stick, while recovering it catches the puck with his glove and moves it a few centimeters. Patrice Bergeron grabs it and passes it on to Brandon Carlo who throws and counts.
However, the referee judges that this accidental contact constitutes a pass with the hand and he cancels the goal. Moments later, the Panthers score in turn, condemning their rivals to play catch-up hockey in this completely crazy game that the Bruins, let go by their star goaltender, will lose 7–5 before returning to Boston for, instead champagne in the goblet, drink the chalice to the dregs.
The decisive psychological turning point represented by Carlo’s disallowed goal rests on a tiny incident that no one noticed when it happened at ground level. It was then that I learned of the existence of coach video”, that team staff member whose job it is to scrutinize the footage of the game, slow down and break it down sequence by sequence so as to be able, if necessary, to use technology against the judgment of the referees .
The same night, in Seattle, the Avalanche were disallowed a goal because of an offside that no one had seen. Was the player really in control of the puck when his skates crossed the blue line? Where the human eye had given the benefit of the doubt, the electronics decided, and the match analyst could conclude without laughing that the ” coach video (deserved) the first star…”
I’m already familiar with the video challenges and endlessly edited, slowed down, endlessly peeled back reshoots of American football. After having seen for the twentieth time, at infinitesimal speed, the receiver crashing to the ground by squeezing the ball a little too softly for the taste of some, we are summoned to answer this question as colorful as it is enigmatic to the ears uninitiated: Did the ball survive the ground ? “, just to remind us that the footballer who does not have full control of the object a millisecond after being crushed on the field with two players weighing more than a hundred kilos on his back, did not catch this pass, period .
Go for the Americans, their reverence for technology and their obsessive love of ballistic precision. But hockey at its very essence is such a fast-paced and fluid sport that reducing it to a series of rewound time fragments at leisure feels like sacrilege. It’s one thing to call in video replay on a disputed play, it’s quite another to have an expert whose full-time occupation is to examine the good moves of the opponent for the sole purpose to identify quantifiable “errors” on the scale of microseconds and millimeters.
I won’t go so far as to claim that this objectification of the game, whose most apparent goal is to put an end to the subjective part of refereeing, risks desacralizing the physical performance of athletes. But in a sporting universe increasingly reduced to its digital representation, where the implacable truth of technology tends to replace human fallibility, we could well end up getting bored of Diego Maradona’s “hand of God”. .
One might even think that such an “evolving process” (according to Commissioner Gary “call me Gary” Bettman about the new rules expanding the use of video replays in hockey) is not unrelated to other desires of purity (no room for error!) that characterize our societies.
In an English series watched some time ago and whose title I forget, a faction of the British secret service had developed a technology allowing them to remotely modify the images captured by digital surveillance cameras, which, in our world self-spied, amounts to changing the very texture of reality. Applied to the hardware of stadiums and arenas, this rather probable discovery, offering an unprecedented possibility of influencing the referee, undoubtedly announces the next big sports cheating scandal.
By the way, how can you be sure that the spectacle unfolding on the screen reflects the action taking place on the ground? Intrusions are multiplying: in baseball, this virtual rectangle that frames the strike zone; in football, the equally virtual lines that appear and move to mark the progression of the attack.
Recently, someone charitably explained to me that the commercials I saw shimmering along the boards of NHL rinks were pure computer graphics animations. This winger that a cross check sends flying in the corner cannot even know that he is crushed in the face against a Tim Hortons ad.
It is therefore hardly surprising that fans of the Bruins, the day after the ultimate stampede of their favorites, cried ‘game-fixing’. The proof ? Well before a goal from Brandon Montour sent the game into overtime, while the Bostonians were still clinging to their slim lead, the TNT network announced, in a red box that appeared superimposed, a goal by the Panthers which, in the facts, would not be scored until 30 seconds later.
That’s what happens when the views guy takes up all the space.
Novelist, freelance writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.