Disgraced referee Tim Peel opens up about make up calls in the NHL

In March of 2021, the National Hockey League announced that referee Tim Peel will no longer work NHL games “now or in the future” after his comments about a Nashville penalty were heard on a hot mic during a Red Wings - Predators game. After Viktor Arvidsson was called for tripping Jon Merrill, Peel was heard on the FOX broadcast saying, “It wasn’t much, but I wanted to get a fuckin’ penalty against Nashville early in the …” before the audio cut out.

Several players were shocked to see him get fired, seeing that he was known to be a tough but good referee around the league.

Peel is now quite active on social media and on Thursday he welcomed fans to send him questions: “Ask me anything about what happened to me!”

One fan went right ahead, asking about make up calls and the role of the league in them?

Peel answered: “That’s a great question and a very fair question. Make up calls are not a thing. What happens is if we have so many penalties against one team our antennas are up to make sure we do not miss a penalty against the other team.”

The former referee is using the same explanation he had shared with Daily Face-Off about the incident that got him fired from the NHL last summer.

“For people to understand as a referee, normally if you’ve called five or six penalties against one team, I think everybody knows ‘if you can find one against the other team to keep them happy then that’s what we do,” Peel told DFO Rundown hosts Jason Gregor and Frank Seravalli.

He had however admitted that he made an error in judgement when trying to explain to his colleague Kelly Sutherland the reason behind his call.

“So I think it was my defence mechanism kicking in, more of an embarrassment thing to a guy that I really respected a lot in Kelly Sutherland and I said ‘yeah it wasn’t much, I wanted to get a penalty — which wasn’t the case at all. I didn’t want to get a penalty against Nashville, and I just made a mistake. I made a tremendous error in judgement by choosing the words that I did.”

Referees are humans after all and I get that sometimes as fans, we forget about that.