Penalties: Part 1

This is the first part in a series on penalties in the NHL. The data comes from various sources on the web, much of it from NHL.com in their play-by-play reports on each game.

In the 2009-2010 season, there were 12328 penalties called, which works out to about 10 per game (as there are 1230 games in each regular season).

The breakdown by period is:

• First period: 4062
• Second period: 4420
• Third period: 3745
• Overtime: 101

So, right off the bat, it looks as though the "they put away the whistles in the third" idea has some merit. We'll take a closer look at that later in the this post, and later in the series when we look at individual referee data.

The top 10 penalties called in 2009-2010 were:

Penalty	Calls
Hooking	1750
Roughing	1502
Fighting	1423
Tripping	1412
Interference	1065
Holding	953
Slashing	783
Hi-sticking	747
Cross checking	483
Boarding	310

Some notables that are missing from the top 10 include: Delay of game (puck over glass), Too many men, Goaltender interference, Holding the stick and the bloody version of Hi-sticking.

All told, there were 50 distinct types of penalties called in 2009-2010 (I was surprised how many different ones there were). Here are a few that were almost never called:

• Spearing was called 3 times, and one additional time as a double minor.
• Abusive Language - Bench was called twice
• Just one Illegal Stick penalty, on Brett Carson of the Hurricanes at 18:41 of the third period in a 5-1 blowout over the Rangers. Not sure the point of that one was...

Now let's take a look at the most commonly called penalties, broken out by period (I combined both the regular and double minor versions of Hi-sticking):

	Period
Penalty	1	2	3	OT	Total
Boarding	94	109	104	3	310
Cross checking	147	172	160	4	483
Delaying Game-Puck over glass	91	94	106	1	292
Fighting	674	454	295		1423
Hi-sticking	257	277	298	12	747
Holding	293	353	300	7	953
Holding the stick	54	67	42		163
Hooking	594	661	480	15	1750
Interference	376	394	287	8	1065
Interference on goalkeeper	67	85	79	2	233
Roughing	440	541	512	9	1502
Slashing	210	303	261	9	783
Too many men/ice - bench	74	104	60	3	241
Tripping	433	538	421	20	1412

We already saw previously that calls from the second period to the third period dropped from 4420 to 3745, a 15% drop. Most of these are judgement calls on the part of the refs. You can see they are pretty consistent on many of them - Roughing, Too many men, Boarding, Cross checking, Hi-sticking, Slashing, etc.

Take a second look at three calls that have a definitive impact on the speed and flow of the game - here they are with the drop from the second to the third period:

• Hooking - dropped by 27%
• Interference - dropped by 27%
• Tripping - dropped by 22%

I'm willing to let Tripping drop - it's essentially flat with the first period, so I could argue that the long change has something to do with that.

Hooking and Interference calls, however are way down from the first period numbers too. You can't tell me that it's not happening as much in the third period - I don't buy it. I think the refs are exercising their "judgement" (such as it is) instead of calling what they see on these penalties.

Any thoughts on the analysis?