The offside coach's challenge has turned the neutral zone into hockey's most litigated real estate
There is no time limit on how far back a coach can go to challenge an offside, and no limit on how long after a goal they can call for one. That single design flaw is why we now regularly see a team challenge a zone entry that happened ninety seconds and a full shift ago, well after the actual scoring sequence developed naturally out of it. The rule was built to fix a genuinely bad missed call from 2013, and it has, but the fix came with zero guardrails on how far it could be stretched. The result is a system that treats a skate blade a few inches offside, on a play that had nothing to do with how the goal actually happened, as equally worth overturning as a blatant, play-defining missed call. Slow-motion replay finds marginal offsides on almost every zone entry if you look hard enough, which means the challenge isn't really testing whether a mistake happened, it's testing whether a coach is willing to gamble a timeout on finding one. Put a real limit on it. Void any offside review on entries that happened more than 30 or 45 seconds before the whistle, the way some proposals already suggest, and the challenge goes back to catching genuine blown calls instead of relitigating entire shifts. [Oilersnation's breakdown](https://oilersnation.com/news/nhl-offside-review-needs-to-be-updated) covers exactly why the current version needs an update.
