Inside the NHL’s Situation Room 

“It could be four guys on a quiet night, it could be 25 guys on a busy night,” King said. “Our job is to make sure that games are played fairly, and to make sure that the pucks more importantly enter the net the right way. So, our guys that are assigned to a specific game, it's their job to watch that game and that game only. And if they have any issues in the game, they let us up here know.”

Because King and his team watch literally everything that happens on NHL ice, they often can identify elements of the game that might need attention, clarification, or re-enforcement.

It’s an hour before NHL games begin and in the midst of downtown Toronto, on the 10^th floor of a building on Bay Street, part of the League’s nerve center is coming to life. It’s the NHL’s Situation Room – the home for a dedicated team of professionals who collectively watch every millisecond of every game played to ensure as much consistency as possible across the game of hockey.

“(This is) where we are the keepers of the game,” executive vice-president of hockey operations, Kris King said. “We watch the games, and we try to keep (them) fair and safe for everybody involved.”

The walls of the room are papered with large monitors that can showcase one view of a game or split to show multiple angles or separate games depending on the busyness of the schedule. Across the length of the room runs two rows of workstations. The back row is dedicated to game-specific viewers who watch multiple angles of a game simultaneously with pinpoint precision. The center of the top row is King’s office for the night – he runs point across all games serving as a second set of eyes, a touchpoint for questions, and ultimately communication to game-level officials as needed.

Throughout a game, you can hear King call out to one of his loggers about a specific play, and there’s ongoing communication about what games are being played. And everyone jumps into action if a challenge is issued from one of the coaches in a matchup.

“There's a process we follow,” King said. “We talk to the officials that made the call in real-time at the arena. We’ll supply them with as much information as they need (including) replays. Of course, you remember they've called those plays once in real-time at quite quick speeds, I might add, so we slow it down.

“We're methodical in what we show them. We talk them through the process and between ourselves and the referees on the ice, we get to the right call. We use our experience and our consistency…and we react to the situations that we have to.”

There are more people than just game loggers and oversight in the situation room, too. There’s always a retired official in the situation room as well as an IT professional to ensure that all the technology required to watch and support games in real-time is running as planned.

And that technology is always improving. King and his team are always upgrading equipment – just recently they added new headsets to improve communication with on-ice officials -- and by next season, the team will move into a bigger space to allow for more real estate for screens and other upgraded systems.

Whether a day has just four games on the slate, or all 32 teams are in action, the task for the group in the situation room remains the same – to maintain consistency in how goals enter the net in the NHL with an ever-present eye on how the game can be improved.

“One thing about this room is I think you have to understand we really like the game because we watch a heck of a lot of it,” King said. “We're just trying to deliver the best product we possibly can. We rely on that original call on the ice by the official, and then we rely on our consistency of the same guys making those calls every night to get to the right answer. One team might not like the call one night, and they might like it another. But we have no (stake) in the game. We just want to use our experience to get to the right call.”