Paul Devorski – The People’s Words
May 8, 2010, by Homme De Sept-Iles
Oh, you know. Here and there. – HDS
Paul Devorski was the senior referee for Thursday night’s game four second-round playoff matchup between the NHL Pittsburgh Penguins and Vos Canadiens de Montréal. In a year of good overall officiating in Montreal games, this one becomes even more notorious for its missed calls and seeming one-sidedness. Was it bias? Was it incompetence? Was it an ageing ref’s attempt to keep hockey in the sixties?
From around the web, here are some of the longer-standing thoughts on Devorski (spelling errors included):
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EricBowser
10-16-2005, 04:04 PM
For all the struggles of the Pittsburgh Penguins starting 0-2-4, it hasn’t helped the team in three of the games, Paul Devorski was the lead official. Devorski appears to be blatantly ignoring the NHL’s new standard of enforcement when it comes to the Penguins. He swallowed the whistle in the third period as the Penguins finally woke up from their embarrassing start only to be hooked and knocked all around the ice without nary a penalty call for the Lightning.
Brooks Orpik was called for boarding in the first period as he cross-checked a player into the boards, nowhere near as hard as Orpik was slammed head long into the boards Friday night in Philadelphia. Who the referee to call both penalties, Paul Devorski.
Who swallowed the whistle when the Penguins were buzzing like bees around the net and John LeClair took a two-handed cross-check to the back and knocked down? Paul Devorski.
Who swallowed the whistle as Mark Recchi was knocked down trying to get away from being pinned along the boards? Paul Devorski?
And then Crosby.
Friday night, watch the glare Devorski gives Crosby late in the game as he’s called for holding. He’s trying to goad Crosby into a misconduct penalty. Last night, same thing. Crosby wasn’t at all happy with the non-calls by Devorski and let him hear it when the whistle blew for his slashing penalty. After the game, Crosby being the good sport and REAL NHL star, apologized for putting his team down an extra 2-minutes but he wouldn’t discuss Paul Devorski.
The Penguins, most noticeably Mario Lemieux, have had their fits throughout the years with Devorski not calling the game by the rules and allowing clutch-n-grab hockey to prosper. No one on the team, especially Lemieux, will go on record to specifically call out Devorski’s history with the team or his work to date this season but the head of officiating better take a look and personally review those three games this season.
Let’s be clear, officiating by the league has not been the reason why the Penguins are off to its worst start since the 1969 season but it doesn’t help with inferior officiating by Paul Devorski.
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Topic: Top 5 Worst Refs??
Displaying all 2 posts.
Post #1
Ryan wroteon March 22, 2007 at 7:40pm
In no specific order I gotta go with Paul Devorski, Kerry Fraser, Don Koharski, Dennis Larue, Bill Mccreary, Mick Magoo i know theres 6 their all just that bad
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FIN – USA 4-3 (2-1, 2-1, 0-1)
Two and a half minutes of good hockey and then a wave of BS started by Paul Devorski. Havn’t heard about him? Well he isn’t a player, his a referee and the worst one I’ve seen yet. Many people found it questionable to have a North American ref in an American game, but this was just terrible. About half of his “penalties” wasn’t really worth a penalty but that’s nothing compared to what he allowed. Typically for bad judges, his random penalty line didn’t hold through the game, in the last five minutes he wouldn’t have raised his hand for murder. With the two first American goals being results of this bad referee-ing one could even argue that if it wasn’t for the ref the game wouldn’t have been as even as it was.
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Who do you Side With? Stalin or Hitler?
Not to suggest that either of the two men this post is about are mass murders, but they are two of the most evil men on the planet.
You see, Paul Devorski and Kerry Fraser are at odds over the firing of a third referee, Doug Warren. I do not know Warren well enough to comment, but any time Kerry Fraser says someone is a good referee, I am going to lean toward the opposite opinion. However, that puts me on the side of Devorski, and that just does not sit well with me either.
These are possibly the two worst NHL refs I have ever seen work. How they lasted as long as they have is beyond me. Yes, they do a difficult job, at high speed, and are human. They are likely to make mistakes no matter what. I can live with mistakes. These two guys have a different definition of what constitutes a penalty every time they blow the whistle.
But I am getting away from the point.
In this situation, when two people you loathe more than any other two on the plant disagree on something, what do you do? Assume there is more to the story and that they are both wrong? That would be where I would go as well, except that Devorski seems to be right on this one.
Hang on. I think I just choked on that statement.
OK, I’m good now.
The Warren side says that he was fired because he got involved with the refs union executive board. That is absurd as at least half of the holding calls Devorski has called in his career. The NHL does not fear the NHLOA. They just don’t. While the game would be difficult to play without the NHL level refs, it could still be played. The game can’t be played without the players, thus the power of the NHLPA.
Personally, it sounds like sour grapes from a guy who was fired, and could not get the union to get his job back through the back door.
So. Hitler or Stalin? Either way, you have to side with evil.Seabrook’s loss hurts, but don’t make it worse by bringing in a goon
It wasn’t that Anaheim defenseman James Wisniewski knocked out Blackhawks defenseman Brent Seabrook with a dirty hit worthy of a suspension longer than Alex Ovechkin got for injuring Brian Campbell.
No, it was the utter incompetence of referees Paul Devorski and Ian Walsh to let him get away with it.
Wisniewski charged at Seabrook from 40 feet away. Wisniewski left his skates to hit Seabrook. Wisniewski hit a guy who didn’t have the puck. Any one of those sentences is a penalty. Combined, they’re a boarding major and game misconduct with a league review and an unpaid vacation to follow.
But no. The goofs in stripes handed out a mere two minutes for charging. All that outsized action by Wisniewski, plus Seabrook’s head smashes into the glass and he appears concussed if not knocked out, and it’s only a minor?
I don’t like railing about officiating, but this case definitely was game-changing and potentially season-killing. I don’t know if I’d go far enough to suggest that that Wisniewski endangered Seabrook’s career, but the fact that it’s on the table only heightens the gross negligence by the referees.
Ultimately, Paul Devorski and Ian Walsh dropped the ball last night. First, by not calling the initial hit on Perry and then by not properly calling the retaliation hit on Seabrook. I would be hard-pressed to say that Wisniewski did anything wrong under the circumstances. Seabrook was playing with fire by going after Perry when the Anaheim forward corps is so riddled with injuries. I don’t know if he was expecting the Ducks to go after Kane or Toews in retaliation, but he had to assume something was coming his way. And that’s just not the sort of chance you can take with so many injured defensemen in your lineup. You can’t assume their enforcer will pull your enforcer aside or they will wait for you to put your head down. If you throw at someone’s head, you’ve got to be prepared for them to rush the mound.
If the NHL wants to punish injuries instead of intent, fine, but the referees have to do their part to stop situations from escalating into an injury. Wisniewski should be suspended because what he did was against the rules and he wasn’t punished in-game, but make no mistake, Seabrook is complicit in his own injury. He’s not missing time for the senseless acts of an amoral goon.”
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