Last night while watching the Bruins’ double overtime loss to Montreal, I noticed something I’ve only casually noticed before.

The time keepers suck.

Think of how many times you’ve been watching a hockey game and the referee has blown the whistle.  If you watch the clock, there’s between half a second and a couple of seconds that tick by before the time keeper stops the clock.

Not a big deal, right?

Now imagine that happens close to a hundred times — that’s roughly how many face offs there were in last night’s game.

That’s nearly two full minutes of hockey that are lost due to the delay between the whistle and the clock stop.

Sometimes they’ll go back and reset the clock if it’s close to the end of the game, but most times they just ignore that time.  Imagine what a team trying to come back from behind and win could do with two extra minutes of a hockey game.  That’s an extra 3% of playtime.

Now, imagine that the time keeper didn’t have to stop the clock. Imagine if (in my imaginary world where I could make things instead of just think them up), the whistle stopped the clock.

The whistle hasn’t been improved upon since it was invented (that’s a complete guess, I have no idea and no inclination to do the research), but imagine a bluetooth or wifi whistle that connected to the time system. When the ref blows the whistle, the clock stops immediately.

Wouldn’t you want your team to get those few precious seconds back every time the whistle blows?