NHL officiating is, by far, the worst of the major sports.

In the playoffs, it finds a whole new level of wretched.

Witness Game 3 of the Penguins-Flyers series at Philadelphia on Wednesday.

Sidney Crosby got called for the first embellishment penalty of his 21-year career. As Penguins coach Dan Muse correctly said, “Sid doesn’t embellish.”

Crosby got high-sticked in the face before a draw, on the sly but intentionally. The upshot was a great trade for the Flyers: Their worst player and Crosby each went off for two minutes. It’s part of the NHL’s never-ending campaign to make gritty scrubs equal to skilled superstars.

That provided more chaos for the Flyers to thrive in.

Same applied after the scrum between Bryan Rust and the Flyers’ Travis Konecny.

That resulted in two jam-packed penalty boxes, Rust inexplicably getting an extra minor, and a game-tying power-play goal for the Flyers. Despite Konecny initiating with an elbow and going unpunished for kicking. (The rulebook calls for a five-minute match penalty and ejection.)

After the game, Muse and his Penguins rightly criticized the officiating.

But maybe too much.

While the officiating was awful, that’s not why the Penguins are on the verge of getting swept.

The Penguins just don’t have the extra gear necessary to cope with the speed and grind of playoff hockey. They can’t keep up.

They’re like the Steelers: Good enough to squeak into the playoffs, not good enough to win upon getting there.

That would have likely been the case against any team the Penguins might have played in the postseason. After a challenging 82-game regular season that saw them labor to overachieve.

To flip the script, as I’ve heard it said.

After bragging about proving doubters wrong, the Penguins proved skeptics decisively right in three losses to Philadelphia that were more lopsided than the score. Had they confirmed what cynics believed earlier, the Penguins would be in line for a much better draft pick.

The Penguins haven’t gotten bullied. Not exactly.

But the Flyers constantly initiate, the Penguins never do, the referees lose control, the Penguins aren’t adept at handling it, and the Flyers are the kings of bedlam.

Mayhem can be negated. The Penguins have done it before. The Flyers have always played like this, and the Penguins eliminated them in 2008, ‘09 and ‘18.

But this version of the Penguins doesn’t have the necessary mentality.

The Flyers are execrable.

But they know who they are.

Some fussed about the Flyers’ pre-game hype video, which led off with Mario Lemieux being sucker-punched by a Flyer back when. Flyers mascot Gritty beat up a fake Iceburgh.

But the idea wasn’t to avoid offending anybody’s sensibilities.

The idea was to get the mob at Xfinity Mobile Arena fired up, and it worked.

The Flyers aren’t selling class. They have none.

The Flyers are peddling uncooked flesh to cannibals. That’s their identity.

As the Penguins undergo the massive overhaul that is surely to follow this series, they need to incorporate a bit of what the Flyers have.

Not too much.