The other night, I was having a drink at a local bar. I got in a small altercation with another patron, and to get him out of my face, I gave him a light push on the shoulder. To my surprise, he then proceeded to pull out a three foot long machete and chop his entire arm off in one fell swoop! Now, I’m going to prison for attempted murder! When I tried to explain to the cops that I wasn’t the one who chopped off his arm, they argued that since I was the closest person to him at the time, it was my fault. I’m now writing this from prison, planning to get out in two minutes or less.

Does that sound fair, NHL?

My point here: There needs to be a major change in the way we call embellishment penalties. The vast majority of the time, refs should not be calling embellishment AND a minor penalty at the same time. It just doesn’t make sense. In my mind, any embellishment that is so obvious it warrants a call really only happen when a player thinks the whistle won’t get blown unless they ham it up. By that metric, we shouldn’t be penalizing players for committing minor stick infractions, which are extremely standard and happen a million times a game, just because their opponent has decided this is the moment to act as if they’ve just had their arm chopped off.

There are exceptions to this idea, obviously. High sticking, for example, should always be called, embellishment or not, as protecting against head injuries should be of paramount importance to Player Safety. Boarding, too, I’d argue. But a slash? Or interference? We saw the latter last night in the Senators-Sabres game, with Claude Giroux ending up in the box alongside Peyton Krebs. What should have been a Senators power play ended up being a four-on-four, where Buffalo scored to make it 3-0, essentially putting the game out of reach. Sens fan or not, that scenario should never happen.

The NHL claims they want to limit diving as much as possible, going as far as to hand out fines to some of the leagues most frequent offenders. However, when it comes to refereeing, that message has fallen short.

As it stands, there is still way more incentive for teams to encourage embellishment, as the best case scenario is that you get to go on the power play, whereas the worst case is two minutes of four-on-four. For some of the faster teams in the league, that four-on-four usually ends up being a net positive, meaning it becomes even more beneficial to pull out the machetes and hack away.

That, to me, is bad hockey.