Those NHL coach’s challenges for blown offside calls on scoring plays?

Kill them.

End them. As soon as possible.

Sometimes it takes a while before one sees the error of their ways, and such is the case with NHL rules changes. It took the Brett Hull incident in 1999 … um, we mean “a desire to regain some of the time and spontaneity lost to review” to end that insipid video review process for skates in the crease. It took a decade before the NHL did something to reduce those inane exhibitions of anti-hockey known as shootouts by applying 3-on-3 overtime as the antidote.

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But in the case of the offside coach’s challenge, it’s only taken one season to see what a mistake it’s been.

It’s a mistake to overturn goals on offside plays that hardly affect their outcome, or when a dozen other missed calls on a play aren’t subject for review. It’s a mistake to scrutinize human error on plays that last a millisecond; and it’s a mistake to delete dynamic scoring plays from memory at a time when goal scoring is so tenuous that we’re talking about shrinking goalies and widening nets.

Let’s take it back to the start: For the first time, the NHL decided to allow coach’s challenges for the 2015-16 season, with NHL bench bosses anteing up a timeout in exchange for the chance to confirm or deny the legality of a goal.

Reviewing goalie interference was an obvious move, given how much is missed by the naked eye on plays that directly affect a goal from being scored. (Save that emphasis for later.)

Reviewing blown offside calls probably wouldn’t have been considered were it not for a 2013 game in which Matt Duchene scored a goal for the Colorado Avalanche that was a country mile offside.

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Now, no one would want that goal to stand. It should have required the linesman to immediately be shipped off for lasik surgery. It was embarrassing. It was egregious.

Great word, that one: “egregious.”

It’s actually become synonymous for the types of offside plays the NHL hoped would be eliminated with the coach’s challenge.

"You want to use video replay to get egregious plays, not close calls where it's 50-50. [Coaches] can live with some of the close plays that happen in our sport. It's what make our sport so great. It travels so fast,” said Mike Murphy, NHL vice president of hockey operations, last October. "The reason we instituted it was so that we could get the egregious calls particularly right, ones that everybody alive sees and says, 'This is the wrong call, it's a screw-up.'"

Or as Stan Bowman said, “The whole point of the coach’s challenge was to get rid of those [calls] that were egregious.”

Goalie interference? Egregious, no question. The physical jostling of a goaltender before a puck crosses the line, or confirmation that the jostling didn’t affect the play, is something video review should and does scrutinize. It’s something that directly affects a goal being scored.

Offside calls, by and large? Not egregious.

The Jori Lehtera offside in Game 2 of the St. Louis Blues’ series against the Chicago Blackhawks is a play that wasn’t caught by the naked eye, and probably wasn’t the 500 or so times it went undetected in the regular season.

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