The NHL playoffs begin on Wednesday, as the remaining 16 teams get set to begin what they hope will be a two-month journey towards the Stanley Cup. It’s a great time to be a hockey fan.

But this year, there’s a cloud hanging over everything. A controversy over the league’s goaltender interference rules has flared up periodically all season long, especially down the stretch. And that has fans wondering when – not if – a key game is going to be determined by an interference call that everyone hates.

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So what’s the problem, and what if anything can the NHL do about it? Let’s dig into it, Q&A style.

So what is goaltender interference?

Goaltending is a tough job. You’re expected to stop pucks that can be traveling 100mph. Opposing players are constantly buzzing around you, or planting themselves in front of you to block your view. Those players will also occasionally hack at a puck you’re trying to cover, or bump into you as you’re trying to establish position. And occasionally they’ll just slam right into you at top speed, knocking you flying.

Some of that is legal. But a lot of it isn’t, and the goaltender is supposed to be given a certain amount of protection by the referees. For that reason, there are various rules about what the opposing players can and can’t do, and if they violate those rules in the course of scoring a goal, it’s not supposed to count.

So far so good. Where’s the problem?

For years, goaltender interference was a call that could only be made by the referee on the ice. That generally worked fine, but there were cases where it felt like a call got missed. For example, here’s a play from 2010 in which a player outright steamrolls a goaltender, and the goal somehow still stands. Those sorts of plays were rare, but when they did happen there was no remedy. Surely, many of us figured, there had to be a better way.

And so, beginning with the 2015-16 season, the league added replay review for goaltender interference. Coaches could ask for a review if they felt an interference call had been missed, at the cost of a timeout if the play was upheld.

The idea was that this was a way to catch those obvious misses. It’s a tough call to make in real-time and we have the technology to take another look, the thinking went, so let’s get it right.

And did the new review rule do that?

Sort of. There certainly were some bad calls that were overturned on a challenge. But it quickly became apparent that the challenge was going to be used far more often than most of us thought. Goals are crucial, especially in today’s low-scoring NHL. And since losing a timeout is a relatively small penalty for being wrong, it made sense for coaches to challenge just about anything that looked like it had any hope of being overturned.

In theory, that should have meant that we had to sit through a bunch of failed challenges. That would have been annoying – these things can drag on for a while and suck the momentum out of the game – but we could have lived with it. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, the officials started overturning calls fairly often. And many of those reversals came on plays that were far from obvious. Instead of only catching the clear misses, calls were being changed on what amounted to nit-picking.

Eventually it started to feel like there was a goal being reviewed somewhere almost every night. And often, nobody knew what the result would be until it was announced.

Wait, all this sounds familiar. Didn’t we already do this “replay review is going to ruin the playoffs” thing?

You may be thinking of the offside review, which was also introduced for the 2015-16 season. We covered the offside review controversy back in 2016, when fans were worried it would screw up a key playoff game. And sure enough, that’s what ended up happening.

So the interference problem is as bad as the offside review?

Oh no. It’s far worse.

When instant replay works well in sports, it’s for calls that are black-and-white. The shot crossed the goal line, or it didn’t. The ball was fair, or it was foul. The receiver’s foot came down in bounds or out of bounds. The NHL’s offside rule would seem to fit into that category too. In practice, the review rule was so broad that it led to goals being waved off for plays that had little or nothing to do with the scoring play. But at least in theory, offside makes sense as a reviewable play.

But goaltender interference is different, because the rule as currently written is almost entirely subjective. Officials have to make determinations like whether contact with a goaltender was intentional or incidental, whether it was forced by the actions of a defending player, and whether it prevented the goaltender from making a save he otherwise would have.

Replay doesn’t help you much there, because with the rare exception of the very obvious blown calls, almost all the decisions fall into a grey area. They’re the sort of calls that two fans can view from the same angle and come to very different conclusions (especially if they’re biased because their teams are involved). Making those calls in real-time will always get you an occasional controversy. But when you subject them to frame-by-frame replay breakdowns that fans have been told will result in “just getting it right”, you’re setting expectations that are impossible to meet.

The closest comparable would be the NFL’s use of replay to determine what is or isn’t a catch. That one also features a moderately complicated rule with a subjective component. And it’s no coincidence that NFL fans hate it, and are constantly complaining about it. The NFL has been trying to fix that rule for years.

And the NHL’s goaltender interference call is far more subjective than the NFL’s catch rule. It was inevitable that everyone would end up hating it.

But wait, if the replay rule has been in place for three years, why is everyone only mad about it now?

Well, plenty of fans were mad all along, especially when a weird call screwed over their favorite team or happened in an important game. But it certainly feels like something shifted this season. Maybe it took a while for the bad calls to reach a tipping point. Maybe fans just got bored of complaining about offside review and decided they wanted to move onto to something else. Or maybe we’ve just had the bad luck of having some really high-profile calls this year.

Whatever it is, we’ve been hearing about the rule all season long. And once everyone started paying close attention, the flaws in the process was obvious. The rule is so subjective that two similar plays will yield different results on different nights, if not in the same game. And to make matters worse, some of this year’s calls really were hard to understand.

For example, here’s a Boston goal from February that sees St Louis goalie Jake Allen get pushed out of his crease. The Blues challenged, but the call was upheld and the goal counted. Here’s Winnipeg goalie Connor Hellebuyck getting slashed in the face before a Vegas goal; that one counted too. But when Toronto’s Auston Matthews or Edmonton’s Connor McDavid made comparatively minor contact with goaltenders, the plays were reversed and the goals were taken off the board.

With every new controversial call, frustration around the league grows. Complaining about each and every interference call became mandatory around the hockey world, with pundits and fans alike competing to see who could summon the most outrage and feigned confusion. Even Kiefer Sutherland is mad.

And through it all, everyone from fans to media to coaches were demanding that the league do something.

And did the league do anything?

They did try. In January, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman acknowledged that officials were “overthinking” the calls, and reminded them that the reviews were only intended to catch obvious errors. That helped a little – fans still weren’t always clear on how the rule worked, but at least they could assume that most calls would confirmed. And in March, the league changed the process for the reviews themselves so that the final call would be made by an off-ice official instead of the referee, in an effort to get more consistency.

People seemed to like that change. Then it went into effect, and one of the first major calls came in a crucial recent game between the Panthers and Predators. A dramatic last-second goal was reviewed for interference, and ultimately waved off despite plenty of fans thinking the evidence wasn’t strong enough to overturn the call on the ice

And so here we are, days before the playoffs start, and nobody trusts the system.

So how do you solve this?

That’s the problem. Everyone says things like “the league needs to fix this”, but nobody seems to actually thought through what that would look like.

Some have suggested that the league change the interference rules to remove the subjectivity and make the calls black-and-white. In theory, that sounds great. In reality, it gets you the skate-in-the-crease rule the NHL had in the 1990s, the one that ruined the 1999 final. Going back to that approach should be a non-starter for anyone who remembers those days.

That leads to the more effective, albeit extreme, solution: Just get rid of replay review for goaltender interference altogether. Treat the play like any other subjective call: Let the referee on the ice make it, understand that you won’t always agree, and learn to live with it. If an especially bad blown call slips through, well, that’s life in pro sports. It will happen, but rarely enough that it’s not worth making everyone miserable with constant coin-flip reviews all season long jut to avoid it.

And can the league do any of that before the playoffs?

Nope. Any major change would have to wait until the offseason. In terms of changes they can make today, the league has already done all it can. And it sure doesn’t seem to have been enough.

So hockey fans are screwed.

Pretty much, yes.

At some point during the playoffs, we’re going to get more of these grey area reviews where half the audience is guaranteed to disagree with the result. That’s pretty much a sure thing at this point – these calls are coming so frequently that making it through two months without one is basically a pipe dream.

The question is when they happen, and to who. The best case is that they all come in games that have already been decided. But if one of these things happens in a game seven, or overtime, or both, look out. And if, hockey gods forbid, it costs one of the league’s marquee teams a series, we’ll never hear the end of it.

So in a few days, when every hockey fan you know is seething over what they swear was an obvious miscarriage of justice while angrily freeze-framing YouTube clips, you’ll know why. Don’t engage in conversation or make eye contact. And whatever you do, don’t make any comments about the importance of “getting it right”.