“That one hurt.”

NHL referee Tim Peel and I are at Foley’s pub in New York, which is the only logical place for a hockey summit. He’s between games, having officiated in Washington the night before and headed over to New Jersey on Friday night. He’s affable, engaging, the kind of guy who gives you a tap on the knee before hitting a punchline in that “you’re going to want to hear this one” way.

And he’s sitting across from a guy who’s ridden his ass like a jockey for the last two years.

We were aware of Tim Peel well before his foibles became a department on this website. A lot of hockey fans were. The criticism of his many mishaps tracks back to 2008 on the venerable Kukla’s Korner. The advent of social media in hockey fandom led to a cottage industry of “Tim Peel Alerts” when he was scheduled to officiate the game.

We had written about him regularly since around Dec. 2013, which is when “The Adventures of Tim Peel, Terrible NHL Referee” debuted. That was followed by “The Continuing Adventures of Tim Peel” and so on. We’d show his blown calls and bad judgment, and assess it with a banana peel score, like a star scale. There’s no question this helped push Peel as the poster-boy for NHL officiating incompetence, although we’d argue he was already in that spotlight when we intensified it.

Anyway, here’s Peel, beer in hand, explaining that for all the derision, all the criticism, there was one thing that really hurt.

It was when he was named to officiate the Sochi Olympics hockey tournament in Dec. 2013, and our response was to publish a laundry list of his mistakes in the NHL. But it wasn’t so much that as the headline that got to him: “Tim Peel is an Olympic referee; what’s Russian for ‘blown call’?”

It was at that point, he tells me, when he realized that there was this permanent stigma attached to his name; that when his two young children are old enough, that they’ll search out their dad on the Internet and this is what they’ll find.

I know this was part of the message he wanted to convey to me, having tried to set up a meeting on a few previous occasions. A chance to see the human behind the zebra sweater, clear the air, all that. And I appreciated the effort.

Me? Well, I love dealing with those I criticize and those who are critical of me. If it doesn’t lead to cringe-worthy confrontations, it will lead to some level of greater understanding about each other, which is always productive.

This meeting was surreal. I’m not going to lie. He was just so god-damned nice to someone that picked apart his failures and helped turn “Tim Peel Alert” into Twitter shorthand for “what’s going to get screwed up tonight?” He was, like too nice. The kind of nice the precedes a broken bottle and him gutting me like a trout in the middle of a Manhattan sports bar.

But instead we were toasting shots of tequila while glancing at the Wild and Flames on the television; two hockey guys, talking hockey.

Here’s what I learned about Tim Peel in 90 minutes on two bar stools: He knows who he is. He has a level of self-evaluation that’s impressive, although I wished I had asked if it was influenced at all by the public scorn he deals with. My concern was that it was going to be an evening of him defending each criticism I’ve given him through the years; instead, it was an acknowledgment that he screws up sometimes, and screws up grandly.

Case in point: The Sami Vatanen diving call.

Peel called diving on the Anaheim Ducks defenseman in one of the single worst calls of the NHL season. It sent Bruce Boudreau into hysterics, and rightfully so.

But Peel knows it was a bad call, to the point where he skated up to the Ducks bench and apologized the next time he officiated an Anaheim game. So why make it? Well, because the NHL wanted a crackdown on diving, and with that mandate, he felt compelled to make that call.

In talking to Peel, you start to see a pattern: The NHL asks its officials to manage the game a certain way, and they have to do it. The Alex Ovechkin penalty in the previous night’s game in Washington?

Peel admits it was a call he wouldn’t have made in a 1-1 game, and wouldn’t have made without knowing that the NHL wants this penalty for the sake of "game management," in order to ensure a 4-0 game between two rivals doesn’t get out of hand. Peel said he went over to Barry Trotz after the call, explained it, and the coach, having seen this episode before, said he understood.

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