Referee Graham Skilliter will work the 900th regular-season game of his NHL career tonight – Thursday, November 5, when the Anaheim Ducks visit the Edmonton Oilers at Rogers Place. He’ll take the ice alongside referee Cody Beach, with Scott Cherrey and David Brisebois on the lines – in the same city where he made his NHL debut.
The La Ronge, Saskatchewan, native reaches 900 in his 15th season working NHL games, with 40 Stanley Cup Playoff games on his resume.
Skilliter first put on the stripes at age 11 in Kindersley, Saskatchewan, following his father Bruce, a longtime local official and SJHL linesman.
“I started officiating when I was 11 years old,” Skilliter said. “My dad was a local official in Kindersley, where I grew up. I followed in my dad’s footsteps… He probably watched every game I did as a child.”
By 16, he was working the lines in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League alongside his dad.
From there, the ladder ran through Saskatoon and six seasons in the WHL – two as a linesman, four as a referee – a full-time ECHL season in 2010-11 that included Games 1 and 5 of the 2011 Kelly Cup Finals, and an NHL contract in 2011. The league assigned him to the AHL, where he spent the majority of three seasons and refereed three straight Calder Cup Finals, closing the run with Texas’s decisive Game 5 win over St. John’s to take the 2014 Calder Cup. He also worked the 2013 Spengler Cup in Davos, after earlier international assignments at the 2009 World University Games and the 2010 IIHF World Championship Division II.
His NHL debut came on January 28, 2013, in Edmonton – the Colorado Avalanche visiting the Oilers – with referee Brad Watson and linesmen Mark Wheler and Jay Sharrers. It was an all-WHL-alumni crew for a kid from the WHL’s own development program. He worked six games in that lockout-shortened season and 22 more in 2013-14. The NHL promoted him to full-time in 2014, moving him from #48 to the #24 he currently wears.
The playoff work followed starting in 2021; his first postseason game came on May 19, 2021. One of his more noteable nights came in the 2025 playoffs: in Game 3 of the Stars-Jets second-round series, Dallas forward Mason Marchment slashed Skilliter’s shin pads in frustration. Skilliter, whose call it was under league protocol whether the contact rose to abuse of an official, read the room – understanding Marchment’s outburst in the context of a hard-fought playoff game – and declined to pursue it. Marchment avoided a penalty and a suspension, largely in part to the lack of an abuse of officials call during the game.
Skilliter also brought an unusual second career to the rink: he also trained and worked as a paramedic, and has credited each job with making him better at the other – calm in chaos being the shared skill.
“I’ve always said that with my job being a paramedic that being a referee or an official made me a better paramedic and that being a paramedic made me a better official. I attribute that to seeing people in their worst days and having a calmness when chaos is going on around you. When you’re dealing with real-life situations, being on the ice and having that perspective makes it a lot easier to deal with people when their emotions are high and to think clearly and precisely in a situation like that.”
Thirteen years after that debut in Edmonton, game #900 is next.
Congratulations to Graham on 900 games!
