Absurd Things: (3) Salad Forks (2) Blobfish (1) NHL Coach's Challenges

The absurdity of the NHL coach's challenge for offside was laid bare in Monday's Seattle Kraken game against the Philadelphia Flyers.

Many of you missed it, because the game was available only on ESPN+. Consider yourselves lucky.

For one thing, you might have collapsed from shock upon finding out a Kraken goal by Tomas Tatar was allowed to stand after review. But as D.A. Adam Schiff once observed on Law & Order , "Hardly the point."

The point is that Tatar's goal was upheld by exactly one frame of video. Had Tatar entered the zone one frame earlier - one video frame equals 1/30th of a second - the play would have been ruled offside, the goal wiped off the board.

Do you know how small an increment 1/30th of a second is?

Light can only travel a little more than 6,000 miles in 1/30th of a second - and it travels AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT! Light could barely make a round trip from Philly to Seattle and back, and it would be out of breath trying.

That's Tatar at the top of the ESPN+ screengrab at left, desperately trying to maintain contact at or above the blueline as the puck enters the Philadelphia zone.

Later in the sequence, Tatar would park himself in the slot, take a pass, and fire a wrister past Flyers goalie Cal Petersen for an apparent tying goal.

"Apparent," because Flyers coach John Tortorella has been told by his video team that Tatar might have entered the zone early. He calls for a coach's video review.

The ESPN+ audience and fans at Wells Fargo Center, who up until this point had been watching a hockey game, are now treated to the spine-tingling excitement of two linespersons pouring over replays on a tablet.

As if the drama isn't already at a fever pitch, TV viewers are treated to a live view inside the "Situation Room" in Toronto. All that's missing is Wolf Blitzer.

Figures shrouded in darkness examine the same video frame by frame, as if unlocking the mystery of a presidential assassination.

Meanwhile, Tatar has every right to be cranky on the Seattle bench. Goals have been hard to come by for the Kraken this season.

As he's probably asking referee Jean Hebert, "Would you disallow a Picasso because he used a borrowed brush? Would you deny a Shakespeare sonnet because he included one too many commas?"

We know how to use replays, too. By video review, it's determined this video review took a brain-numbing four minutes, 48 seconds.

(FYI, light can travel more than 53.6 million miles in that time span. Just sayin'.)

4:48 is the elapsed time between Tatar's score and referee Brandon Schrader pointing to center ice, confirming that the goal was indeed a goal - by 1/30th of a second.

The comic relief of this buffoonery is provided by Jared McCann, who delivers a playful facewash to Tatar as a belated goal celebration.

What's not amusing, as we've argued here and here , is taking five minutes out of all of our lives - the antithesis of an "entertainment" product - in pursuit of a microscopic examination which harms the enjoyment and integrity of the sport.