Truth. In a single game, a bad call can definitely tilt things one way or the other. If you get 7 chances to win 4 games, there are significantly less excuses.

I look at it as bad calls, just like bad luck and bad bounces, are a part of the game. Hopefully there’s nothing that goes too far in either direction along any of those lines, and that over time, they should mostly balance out. Sure, you may lose the occasional game to a bogus late call, but you probably also won a couple that way too. Across a season, it almost certainly balances out. In a playoff series, it might not balance out as well, but rarely is it that terribly one-sided.

The problem with the post you linked is that he’s looking at everything in terms of a single game, which most certainly can be effected significantly by a referee. But with the exception of football, amongst the major US sports, that should never be the case. In hockey, baseball, and basketball, you’re playing a whole season, and then you’re playing playoff series. Over those periods, its very hard to argue that a ref has consistently had an impact in favor of one team or another (ok, maybe in basketball, but that’s another story). If you lose the last game of the season because of a bad call, and consequently missed the playoffs, well, if you were that great, then what was your excuse for the other 81 games? Same in a playoff series. If you’re actually that great that you should be winning, and the refs are holding you back, then what was your excuse for the rest of your performance across the series?

In that Game 3, the Wings got screwed on what clearly should’ve been a game-tying goal. But to blame that entire game on the ref making that one bad call late is completely bogus, because they certainly had chances throughout that entire game, and failed to make enough of them, despite being the favored and presumably better team. If they lost that series in 7, it wouldn’t have been because a ref screwed up in G3, it would’ve been because of a collective failure to take advantage of the numerous opportunities they got over the course of that series, in the 4 games they lost.