Did Jeff Carter's Game 3 buzzer-beater goal not actually beat the buzzer?
By Allan Muir
Jeff Carter's goal with .07 seconds remaining in the first period barely got in under the wire, but it gave the Kings all the offense they'd need in their 3-0 Game 3 win over the Rangers.
But should it have counted?
Writing at Forbes.com, self-confessed New York fan Mike Ozanian suggests that maybe it didn't beat the buzzer after all.
Here's his reasoning:
Watching the game, I noticed that the clock [on the NBCSN broadcast] had stopped for a couple of seconds with 18.9 seconds remaining in the period.
The puck was in the Kings' zone at the time and I remember thinking back to before the game when play-by-play announcer Doc Emrick said the server at MSG was down (not sure exactly what that means), and I wondered why the commentators did not say anything about the stopped clock before or after Carter’s goal.
It is hard to tell how much, if any time the stopped clock gave the Kings and Carter to beat Henrik Lundqvist.
First off, the server that was down only affected the NHL's real-time scoring system. That explains why shots weren't going up on the board and why stats weren't being propagated on NHL.com, but it has nothing to do with the game clock.
Second, Ozanian is right about the frozen time ... sort of. While the TV clock clearly stalls for a couple of seconds at 18.9, it restarts at 14.6. And that, going by the tried-and-true one-Mississippi standard of measurement (the one used by astrophysicists for its great precision), appears to be an accurate reflection of the time that passed.
It's also worth noting that the TV clock and the game clock are not inexorably synched, so it's possible that the glitch was limited to the NBCSN broadcast and didn't affect the game clock at all. (We're looking for footage of the big board to confirm).
So how much extra time did this odd occurrence really give Los Angeles? Probably none ... but the illusion at least offers Rangers fans a conspiracy theory to chew on during the offseason.
(s/t to Reddit)