Piotrowski is one of the CCHA's best refs, along with Duke Shegos and 2nd-year
man Pochmara, though it's a shame they lost Matt Shegos to retirement. As a
whole though, I think the CCHA doesn't have as good a crop of refs as other
leagues, but maybe it's due to league policy. I don't think it's a coincidence
that since I've followed college hockey, which is admittedly just now
approaching a half dozen years, the CCHA typically has three or four of the top
5 and five or six of the top 10 teams in the NCAA in penalty minutes. I don't
think they're that much rougher than ECAC teams, they just have refs that call
a lot more ticky-tack junk. Of course when you have Rutherford, one of the
leaders in junk and make-up calls, now supervising refs since he retired from
active duty, it makes you wonder if he's teaching other refs to call things
like he did, then whoa nellie.

--- Joe Makowiec wrote:
Does anybody think it's been better this year?  Oh, there've been moments -
in the RPI Holiday tourney we had a guy named Piotrowsky from the CCHA on a
cross-training mission.  When he did call penalties they tended to be
even-up, and he let some stuff go that I wondered about.  And Kotyra called
4 misconducts, including a pair for an after-the-roughing scrum, in the
RPI-Brown game last weekend.  But in the ECAC at least, it's been fairly
even this year.

Also, my contention is that when the officiating *is* bad, it tends to cut
both ways.  If the guy overlooks hooking, and makes weak elbowing calls, he
calls it that way for both teams.
--- end of quote ---