It’s an annual rite of spring, as predictable as cherry blossoms in Washington D.C., or freak snowstorms in Western Canada: Complaining about the state of NHL refereeing.

Every year, there’s a grave concern – especially among fans and especially on social media – that the officiating standard slips when the regular season ends and the playoffs begin. The referees will overlook an infraction that might earn a penalty between October and April but not after. Every year, there’s a hint that this year will be different.

Usually, when the dust settles and the officiating postmortems occur, the conclusion is: No, nothing actually changed.

Tacitly, the NHL acknowledged the problem in September, months after the Lightning won their second consecutive Stanley Cup, a run that included some highly publicized moments of refereeing inconsistency. The greatest culprit related to crosschecking and the number of times egregious crosschecks that seemed like obvious infractions breezed right past the referees’ eyes and went unpenalized.

To its credit, the NHL – which rarely acknowledges an issue relating to refereeing – did so in this case. A directive issued at the start of this season, published on its own website, made cracking down on crosschecking a primary point of emphasis heading into the 2021-22 season. And when NHL officials gathered for their annual preseason training camps they were treated to a review of some of last year’s missed calls from the boss himself, director of officiating Stephen Walkom. Essentially, Walkom walked the group through a number of examples of plays that went unpenalized in the playoffs that they would be asked to call this season. This was non-negotiable.

Stricter cross-checking enforcement would be strictly enforced by hockey ops.

According to TSN analyst Craig Button, that mission was generally accomplished over the course of the 2021-22 regular season.

Moreover, Button also believed the stricter standard will carry over into the playoffs. It means, for example, the type of uproar that arose last year when an emphatic slash by the Islanders’ Scott Mayfield on Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov went controversially unpunished, shouldn’t happen again this year.

“I’m going to use history to predict what may happen in the future,” Button said. “Whenever we’ve had the crackdowns before – on slashes to the hand, and before that, for hooking, holding and interference – they continued into the playoffs. They never stopped. Players knew that the standard had been set.