Gambling website concludes that Chris Lee was the NHL's most trolled referee over past year

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      Older hockey fans can remember the days when arena organists would play "Three Blind Mice" whenever officials made a rotten call against the home team.

      The modern version is Internet trolling.

      And according to the Bookmakers.com website, the most trolled NHL referee over the past 12 months has been Chris Lee.

      The site calculated that there were 43,994 negative posts aimed at NHL officials, with 84 percent of these insults written by males. 

      Fully 54.1% of those aimed at Lee were negative, most concerning his officiating of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Semifinals between the Las Vegas Golden Knights and the Montreal Canadiens.

      "In second place is Tim Peel, who found 27.1% of comments about him online being negative," Bookmakers.coms stated. "This is more than likely down to the hot-mic incident catching him admitting to handing out a bogus penalty while working a game, which ultimately cost him his job. In third comes Dan O’Rourke, who found 21% of posts about him being negative, most of which will have come from his performance with Chris Lee in the Stanley Cup."

      In the past on Straight.com, referee Kelly Sutherland has been lambasted by long-suffering Canucks fan Mike Usinger. It resulted from Sutherland's officiating of the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals—in particular, his failure to penalize Brad Marchand for being such a jerk to Daniel Sedin. The Canucks lost that series in seven games to the Boston Bruins.

      However, Sutherland, who was born in Richmond, B.C., isn't widely despised by fans across the league. In the Bookmakers.com evaluation, Sutherland ranked 10th on in the percentage of negative posts aimed at officials over the past year, at just eight percent.

      Kelly Sutherland gave Daniel Sedin a 10-minute misconduct after Brad Marchand repeatedly punched the Canucks star in the head in the 2011 Stanley Cup Finals.
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