I turned into Sportscenter this afternoon and stuck around through their neverending Lebron James coverage (OMG he didn't shake the Magic's hands and I heard that Dwight Howard took him off his five and is no longer following him on twitter) because next up was the recap of Sunday Night's Stanley Cup Final game. Big mistake. After suffering through that train wreck, and shortly after vomiting, multiple times, I reached this conclusion: I don’t want mainstream coverage of the NHL. Take it off ESPN. No PTI. No Around the Horn. No Sportscenter. Unless Buccigross, Melrose, or Linda Cohn are speaking I’m done with it.
I’ll admit every day during the Caps-Pens series I eagerly awaited 5 o’clock to roll around so I could see our wonderful sport presented to the masses. However, after being forced to watch Michael Wilbon, Woody Paige, and Skip Bayliss butcher what is otherwise frozen I don’t want it anymore. They don’t know the sport, they don’t know the players, they don’t understand the rules.
According to Robert Flores, FILLPula, scored Detroits second goal and and the reason Malkin is going to play in Game 3 is because the NHL thinks he is too good of a player to be suspended. He ignored the fact that they had already rescinded a suspension to Aaron Walker earlier in the playoffs, and they failed to suspend Ovechkin, Cooke, Kunitz, and others who have committed questionable fouls this postseason. Not to mention the aspect of the rule that addresses a second offense in the playoffs, not a first, as well as Colin Campbell’s press release. I’m sick of watching idiots blubber their way through what I’m assuming is mandatory coverage. And nothing is worse than PTI.
The thing that hurts the most is that quite frankly ESPN should be embarrassed that its flagship show, other than Sportscenter of course, employs two people who as PROFESSIONAL sports writers, who are employed by newspapers based in cities that HAVE A NATIONAL HOCKEY LEAGUE TEAM know less about hockey than I, an above average sports fan who hates the NBA and has never seen a game live, know about professional basketball. But they aren’t embarrassed because hockey matters that little to them.
If that’s going to be the case I say as fans we embrace it. Fuck ‘em. We’re not going to become more popular by watering down the sport to appease the average fan and we’re certainly not going to do so by having people like Wilbon and Kornheiser introduce it to them. That’s like sending Joan Rivers and Perez Hilton to other countries as ambassadors. Sure they might be knowledgeable in their respective fields, award show fashion and plastic surgery for Joan, trashing celebrities and blowing dudes for Perez, but that doesn’t mean they should be the ones that explain the US to the rest of the world (btw I’m pretty sure Kornheiser would be Joan Rivers and Wilbon would be Perez which I guess means Tony Reali would be Melissa).
What we should do is embrace the nicheness of the sport, at least for now. Stick with cable television and let hockey be covered by people who know the sport. Fix the NHL network up, make it a 24 hour coverage thing and start producing analysts that can infiltrate ESPN. Perfect the product on the ice. Then once the market’s ready go public. It worked for Mixed Martial Arts and now the UFC is huge. The only difference is in our sport we take the gloves off before we fight.
-the legend
