Montreal Canadiens: NHL chooses to fine Claude Julien for his comments

Claude Julien threw down his wall Saturday night criticizing the refs after the Montreal Canadiens loss to the Dallas Stars and has been fined for it.

What is one of the most overused words in hockey? I’m not talking about plays, positions or stats, just overall words. Claude Julien and the Montreal Canadiens organization have used it many times over the years, and every team seems to bring it up at some point during their respective seasons. That word is accountability.

Accountability is to accept responsibility, either personal or public. We see this come out in the NHL when teams don’t respond, give up leads, lose games they shouldn’t, make immature mistakes, etc. However, when it comes down for the league itself to be accountable, the blame gets shifted, as does the narrative.

Julien didn’t hold back after Saturday’s game against the Dallas Stars. No one is absolving the team for giving up a 3-0 lead, but that doesn’t change the fact that officiating has been up and down this season, lacking any sense of consistency. Plays are made, and penalties are called while the same play will be made, and not a single arm is raised.

And this is not only a Montreal issue. The entire league is being affected by this inconsistency. Gary Bettman and the league relish in the fact that parity is at an all-time high, yet they watch as inconsistency from officiating is taking a role in games.

Julien isn’t the first NHL coach to speak out against officiating. John Tortorella had another energized rant after the Columbus Blue Jackets lost the Chicago Blackhawks in a shootout.

There were issues with the clock that took away some time such that the goal the Blue Jackets scored in overtime didn’t count because time ran out. To make matters worse, Columbus had their goaltender Joonas Korpisalo injured while making a save in the shootout. Tortorella had this to say after the game:

"So the whistle is blown at 19.2 on the clock. For some reason, the clock is run down a second and a tenth to 18.1. Whatever reason, I have no g-d–n idea. So instead of resetting the clock, we have them tell our captain, ‘We’re not going to do it.’ [The league office in] Toronto doesn’t step in, refs don’t do their freaking job and now we lose the game, and we lose our goalie."

Colin Campbell, the director of hockey operations for the NHL, chose to defend the refs and went through the initial steps to find Tortorealla $25,000.

Now we move on to Julien and his comments after the Stars game.

It came out this morning that the league has chosen to fine Claude Julien $10,000 for this. Again, the NHL chooses to ignore the issue at hand and instead penalize the person speaking out about it.

Something needs to change. It’s getting to the point where hockey is a guessing game. An infraction takes place and the players, as well as the coaching staff, have to guess as to whether a call will come or not. This has nothing to do with the fact that “nothing gets called in the playoffs.” It’s about what is right and what is fair. Unfortunately, the NHL is on the other end of this.