The Referees - Part 6 - PIM Spread

Today we'll look at the difference in PIM associated with a referee between his home and road games. This is a derivation of the previous two articles. I noted in Part 5 that some guys jumped positions pretty radically between their home PIM ranking and their road PIM ranking. I thought that was somewhat troubling.

The chart today confirms the results from yesterday. The guys with the biggest shift in ranking are the same guys at the extremes in the difference between their home and road PIM.

The interesting thing is that this spread isn't at all related to the total PIM a ref is associated with. In other words, this seems to be independent of how many penalties the ref calls. Bill McCreary is associated with far fewer PIM (over 5 minutes per game) than Chris Rooney, but their spread is about the same. Same goes for Kozari and Devorski on the other end of the chart.

The average PIM against the home team in a game is 14.28. The average against a road team is 13.38. That's a difference of 0.9. The rankings show that some guys deviate from that significantly, with the spread going as high as 2.56 and as low as -0.88 (meaning, that for Steve Kozari games, 15.73 PIM on the home team and 16.62 on the road team is the average). The chart shows the ref, their home PIM, their road PIM, and the difference. To underscore my previous point, I'm including the shift in ranking that I published yesterday.

Ref	Home PIM	Road PIM	Home/Road Rank Diff	PIM Spread
Chris Rooney	16.93	14.37	-10	2.56
Bill McCreary	14.34	11.93	-16	2.41
Rob Shick	14.29	11.99	-12	2.31
Mike Hasenfratz	15.93	13.73	-12	2.2
Dean Morton	13.44	11.44	-8	2
Eric Furlatt	15.15	13.26	-8	1.89
Dan Marouelli	13.66	11.93	-7	1.73
Rob Martell	13.75	12.15	-7	1.6
Francois St. Laurent	15.19	13.63	-5	1.56
Ian Walsh	15.27	13.74	-3	1.53
Mick McGeough	14.99	13.64	-2	1.34
Craig Spada	15.79	14.45	-4	1.34
Don Koharski	15.37	14.05	-3	1.32
Don Van Massenhoven	14.55	13.28	-4	1.27
Brad Watson	15.42	14.23	-3	1.19
Dennis LaRue	16.52	15.46	-1	1.06
Stephane Auger	13.86	12.81	-2	1.05
Tim Peel	12.64	11.6	-1	1.04
Dean Warren	13.57	12.63	1	0.95
Brad Meier	15.54	14.59	0	0.95
Chris Lee	15.56	14.64	0	0.92
Mike Leggo	12.03	11.2	-1	0.82
Marc Joannette	13.12	12.34	2	0.78
Kerry Fraser	13.07	12.37	4	0.7
Justin St. Pierre	13.74	13.07	2	0.67
Wes McCauley	11.85	11.23	1	0.63
Kelly Sutherland	13.37	13.04	7	0.33
Greg Kimmerly	12.59	12.48	7	0.11
Dan O'Halloran	13.42	13.36	9	0.05
Dave Jackson	15.9	15.88	2	0.03
Kevin Pollock	13.41	13.41	11	0
Dan O'Rourke	14.24	14.42	10	-0.18
Brian Pochmara	14.7	14.9	10	-0.2
Paul Devorski	12.05	12.58	9	-0.53
Gord Dwyer	14.15	14.79	15	-0.64
Tom Kowal	14.3	15.01	14	-0.72
Steve Kozari	15.73	16.62	5	-0.88

Here are the previous parts in the series:
Introduction
Part 1 - High PIM
Part 2 - Low PIM
Part 3 - Home / Road Intro
Part 4 - Home PIM Rankings
Part 5 - Road PIM Rankings

Next up we'll take a look at offensive numbers to see if there's any correlation between a given referee and goals or shots. Should be interesting.