As a 25 year season ticket holder at the Houston (RPI) Field House, I've seen
my share of good and horrendous referees. I see Harry Ammian's name coming up
quite often and I can see where he gets his reputation. Harry has a tendency
to be very lenient on the elbowing, charging and roughing calls and a real
stickler for tripping and hooking. And he is guilty of calling a much tighter
game in the first 2 periods and letting things go at the end of the third,
especially in a tight game. But Harry has one thing going for him, I find
him to be consistent. He seems to make calls consistently for both teams and
seems to be consistent from game to game. I would think that having a bad(?)
referee is probably preferable to having one who is inconsistent. At least
with a consistent but bad referee, a player can figure out what he can or
cannot get
away with. With an inconsistent one, you never know what will be called and
what isn't.
 
Regarding Pierre Belanger: he used to ref at RPI a lot but I haven't seen
him ref
recently. Maybe he got the hint and moved out of town. He gets my vote. He
is the
only referee I've ever heard of to penalize a player (back in the '80s) for
"leaving his feet to play the puck". Yeah, go get them Pierre.
 
On a more positive note, I think it was a wonderful move to abandon the two
referee
system. There was nothing worse than having 2 refs with opposing style skating
together. Then you could get a penalty called (or not) depending on where
you were and
the ice and which ref was watching. Of course, we've yet to see how the 1 ref
2 assistant ref setup will work!!
 
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