My prior comments were not defending running up the score. However, if the league has no guidelines around what is and isn’t acceptable, how can we expect coaches and players to act accordingly? Yes, we’d hope good sense and decency would prevail, but it simply doesn’t.
My point is you can’t put running up the score in the same bucket as the other incidents on that summary, at least not from the details provided. I was very surprised to see that incident on the report because it is not consistent with the other situations. No rules of game play were broken. Was it a classless thing to do? Absolutely. But as the examples show, it’s not an isolated incident. Coaches have different thoughts on what it means to be “crossing the line” so it needs to be better defined if it’s going to be called out and enforced. Maybe there needs to be a mercy rule where the game is called once a certain goal differential is met.
And anyone who says that a team with a low number of players for a game should just forfeit, you need to look up the financial impact of doing so. Your organization would probably just choose to play as well.