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Ron MacLean has spent years acting as a referee for Don Cherry on Coach's Corner.
The longtime Hockey Night in Canada host will turn in his microphone for a striped shirt and a whistle Friday night, when he referees the second period of the NHL exhibition game between the Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins at Mellon Arena.
Ron MacLean will get to referee one period of an NHL exhibition game.
(J.P. Moczulski/Canadian Press)
MacLean will be paired with Stephen Walkom, a former referee and now the the NHL's senior vice-president and director of officiating.
CBC will film MacLean's adventure and show it as a feature during its season-opening broadcast Thursday.
"I have been working on my backward skating," MacLean, a Level 5 referee with the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, said during a conference call Thursday.
"With a solo referee system, the one I worked in for 23 years, you skated pretty well forward for the whole time. In the two-man system, a lot of it is backward skating.
"With [Sidney] Crosby coming down on you or Daniel Briere ... it's a real challenge for the back official to get the hell out of the way."
MacLean was outspoken at times last year over his opposition to the NHL's crackdown on obstruction.
While interviewing Colin Campbell during the second intermission of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals, MacLean took the NHL's director of hockey operations to task for some of the calls and lack of calls during the playoffs.
MacLean said Campbell and John Shannon, the NHL's vice-president of broadcasting, approached him with the idea of taking his opinions on the ice.
"It was an idea to get me involved, to have a dialogue with the referees," he said.
Training camp for refs
MacLean attended the NHL officials training camp at Fort Erie, Ont., where he met with league referees.
"When I went into the first session and just kind of identified what my purpose was, the guys were right there with questions," he said. "It was a great exchange.
"That will be part of the feature, explaining my views on things."
MacLean said working with the referees gave him a better appreciation of how they see the game.
"I always used to have a problem when the referee out at centre ice makes a call," he said.
Now MacLean understands "that [back] guy has an easier time of seeing things because the game is moving a little slower and he has a wider scope.
"It is often the guy down at the end who misses the most obvious things right in front of him," he said. "That was a neat little insight for me that will be valuable in my critiquing."
MacLean said he will scale back some of his criticism of the new rules.
"I will never say I'll never mention it again," he said. "If it were a matter of principle, I would continue to harp on it.
"When it is a matter of taste, it's foolhardy to continue to beat it to death."
A good Canadian kid.
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