March 27th Column

For those of you who hate it when I rant about the televised aspects of hockey, you're out of luck this week, because they're are a few issues that need to be talked about as far as hockey on TV goes this week, mostly negative things. I promise we'll talk more about what has been one of the most interesting NHL seasons in quite some time next week. If you can't wait that long, check out http://battleofny.blogspot.com for more insights. On with the madness...

Guess who's stopped caring about the NHL? That's right, VERSUS.



Remember all that great programming VERSUS used to air before and after NHL playoff games last year? Like that awesome documentary show "Legends of Hockey." Boy that was interesting. I could watch that 35 times (based on how many times VERSUS re-ran it, I probably did) and not get bored with it. What else? There was that hilarious show "The Tournament." Kind of "The Office"-style comedy with hockey parents substituted for Dunder-Mifflinites. There was a show about Jordin Tootoo's upbringing, and Mark Messier running a leadership camp. All that stuff was so interesting. It not only enhanced the experience for the diehard like myself, the best part was that you could be a novice and learn so much about the sport, and then enjoy Stanley Cup Playoff hockey.

Well, that stuff is gone. VERSUS will be airing none of that during this year's NHL postseason, something a VERSUS PR rep even clarified for me. This is very fishy to me. I'm convinced that there are some issues between the league and the network. Even the NHL's inadequacy to put on a good TV product couldn't be keeping the NHL Network in the U.S. (You know, the one Comcast is contractually bound to bring us) from us. There's been no "official" announcement even made about the NHL and VERSUS's supposed renewal through next season. Everyone around the game who I talked to over the weekend agreed with me -- something is definitely not right in VERSUS-land.

If the relationship between network and league are rocky, ratings have never been better. Both Buffalo-Pittsburgh on Tuesday, March 13 and Pittsburgh-NY Rangers on March 19 set ratings records for a regular-season NHL telecasts on the network. While a 0.4 might not sound like much, those are essentially ESPN's averages for the NHL for its last three years broadcasting hockey. ESPN2's average was a 0.2, which has been VERSUS' NHL average this season. We aren't losing eyes on the television sets, we're just losing exposure to the casual fan. It took NHL fans a while, but they've found VERSUS. Let's see if they'll have to search again next year.

Super-zoomed in cameras are not the answer to the NHL's television problem. Just because we're getting closer to the ice with the angle does not give you a better view of the game, it worsens it. Watching New Jersey-Florida from Sunrise on Saturday, you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. Grinding along the boards was a mystery, a few goals were out of sight. Tell you what: Put the camera wherever you want, use the crowd noise at the games (especially this time of year) to put the casual fan in the arena. Putting the camera in the 10th row and zooming in is not the solution.



The NHL on NBC provides us with a chance to hear numerous substitute announcers, be it at the play-by-play spot or the analyst's role. Steve Goldstein is a pro already at the radio level, subbing for Dave Strader on Panthers broadcasts. Steve Cangalosi, usurping Doc Emrick's usual post, is nowhere near a pro. If you think Emrick overuses the word "Drive!"...well, you've never heard Cangalosi. According to him, everything is either a "drive," or a "sharp-angle shot." Former NHL defenseman Brent Severyn is a big improvement on Brian Hayward with the Ducks. It just goes to show you that with hockey announcers, it's completely random in terms of who's good and who isn't.

This Week in the NHL is a great listen for the hardcore hockey fan. New York Rangers TV voice Sam Rosen hosts a 40-minute (hour-long with commercials) look around hockey. He brings in every authority on the coolest game to help analyze what's going on around the sport. Bob McKenzie discusses rumors and hot-button issues. Doc Emrick does a weekly feature on the history of the game. Pierre McGuire and Darren Pang (OK, they can't all be winners) debate the week's biggest issues. Rangers PA announcer Joe Tolleson recaps the plays of the week. Everything you need to know about this great league can be heard on This Week in the NHL, on NHL.com, iTunes, or if your lucky enough, your local Westwood One station.

This is just another example of how hockey fans have had to learn to hunt for their coverage. In addition to "This Week," NBCSports.com has some great videos each week of its coverage. Ray Ferraro, Brett Hull, Pierre McGuire and Eddie Olczyk all do web-exclusive rants each week, and show off various features on NHL players. That's all in addition to their 30-minute web-only pregame show. VERSUS.com does a weekly review and a weekly preview that varies in quality, but is worth the five minutes it takes to watch. If you're still hungry for hockey, go to KuklasKorner.com's "Everything Hockey" section. It will take you to NHL websites, blogs for every team, podcasts, historical sites, and anything else you could ever need to know. Paul Kukla and his merry gang of bloggers again show why, in comparison to the rest of the web, it's the hockey fan's only true online must-see.

-SFM-

March 19th Column

Hey, there was a big funeral going on this weekend, and it was most certainly for Gary Bettman's "New NHL". Well, actually, it's been on life support the past couple weeks. But after about 70 games of its second year of implementation, the refs have clearly finally given up on calling the hooks and holds. Honestly, I think we can live without it. Maybe it's a combination of the players learning that if you hook, you'll be boxed, and the refs not calling it when it does happen. I'm not annoyed that they've stopped calling it, I'm just peeved that I lost a season of hockey just to see it end.

This time of year, rookies aren't just showing up on teams without a prayer of postseason play. Some young players are making a difference on teams who are in the playoff hunt. The two players I'm going to key in on have very different development stories. Rangers forward Ryan Callahan, who scored his first two NHL goals in New York's 7-0 rout of Boston on Saturday, was a 4th-round pick of the Blueshirts and spent three years on the ride to the show, including a World Junior Championships appearance and four seasons in the Ontario Hockey League. (Usually a death knell for any prospect). He finally got his chance with the Rangers AHL affiliate in Hartford, setting a team record with goals in eight consecutive games. After getting a cup of coffee in two December stints, he was called up on Friday, played that night, and scored twice on Saturday.

Devils freshman David Clarkson, on the other hand, was completely undrafted. In a story that mirrors the road current New Jersey centerman John Madden took the big leagues, Clarkson, an Ontario native who spent most of the past year and a half in Albany and Lowell (New Jersey changed minor league affiliates during the past off-season), was the seventh player the Devils had called up from their AHL affiliate this season (just to show you how far he was down the depth chart). He also spent four years in the AHL, and was headed nowhere until Lou Lamoriello signed him to a minor-league deal. He got the call-up Thursday, and played well in a road tilt in Carolina. During the Devils 7-2 loss to the 'Canes on Saturday, however, Clarkson was easily the best forward on the ice for New Jersey. Drawing big cheers from the crowd every time he touched the puck, he scored his first goal that day, and set up a beautiful goal by another Devil rookie, Travis Zajac, in the third. It just shows you that teams are always finding new players in the places you'd least expect.



An extremely awkward moment on VERSUS last Tuesday night. Jack Edwards and Andy Brickley were calling the Buffalo-Pittsburgh game, the very same night the Penguins had reached their new arena deal. Gary Bettman was at the game, and the two men had him up in the booth for an interview. Both of them are lucky they weren't robbed and beaten coming out of the rink that night, the way Bettman punishes what he calls "Conduct detrimental to the league". In the early stages of the interview, Edwards said to Gary: "I know that you often deflect blame."

Gasp! You could almost hear Brickley say "Awkwaaaaard."

Anyway, Bettman and Edwards joked about it. What he meant to say was "credit." Sure. We'll leave it at that. When the interview reached its end, Brickley made a joke about Bettman's height. The big question is: Will we see Jack Edwards and Andy Brickley on VERSUS again? It's only really half-joking. The way this league does deflect blame and hand out punishment for criticism, I wouldn't be surprised if either of them got banned from national television work.

TPS began their second year of having the players use pink sticks for three days, and then auction them off to raise money for breast cancer. Perhaps no sport's athletes are bigger momma's boys than hockey players. Campbell's should hire them and their mothers to do those chunky soup commercial. Can you imagine Alexander Ovechkin's mom in the dressing room feeding Donald Brashear a bowl of Campbell's Chunky? Eh, bad visual. Nevermind.

Ted Nolan's claims that Steve Begin is to blame for Rick DiPietro's injury don't have a stick to swing at, er, a leg to stand on. "[Begin] could have jumped. He's a seasoned veteran. He's a fourth-line guy," said Nolan. "He knew exactly what he was doing: 'By hitting this goaltender, maybe I can knock him out, and we can get a chance to play in the playoffs.' It's one of those things." Watching the play over and over again, it's clear that the fault is at DiPi's hands. He had no reason to be that far out. He was well out of position. You don't prepare for a goalie to be in deep slot when you come charging in. If he had jumped, he'd have had a clear path to the goal, further proving Begin's innocence. Is Teddy Nolan going to cry about being blackballed again? Where's Bryant Gumbel when you need him?

Finally, the Nashville Predators are the first NHL club to 100 points, and it's difficult to see them not coming out of the West this year and going to the Stanley Cup Finals. You just have to hope that this team can survive. Clearly, they have made a connection with the fans in Nashville. No team sells more individual tickets per game. Obviously the casual fan is hooked. But no team can live on 12,000 casual fans. They need more hardcore supporters, and more importantly, more corporate support. It's shameful that Nashville's companies are willing to put their money behind a team with "Pacman" Jones on it, but can't support what is very likely the NHL's best team.

We'll see if a Stanley Cup can bring some bandwagon corporations to the most unconventional of unconventional hockey markets.

March 12th Column

Why anyone would complain about the NHL's championing of the Warner Bros. film "300" is beyond me.

Here's an idea: Take a hip looking movie with great technology, lots of violence and comic book-nerd credibility (the kind the NHL's main 18-34 male demographic loves) and make a connection between the plot of the movie (300 Spartan soldiers' fight against the largest army ever assembled) with the chase for the Stanley Cup.

You know what? "300" made $70 million this weekend at the box office.

Think the NHL doesn't like being associated with that?

When it comes to Chris Simon's tomahawk chop on Ryan Hollweg, the NHL absolutely gave Simon the correct punishment. He sits out the rest of the season and the playoffs. Doesn't matter how far the New York Islanders go, he will not play. Now, if the amount of games the Islanders play in the postseason doesn't add up to 25 (The Isles had 15 games left at the start of the suspension, so they'd need to be in the 2nd round at least), Simon will sit out the start of the next season until it does. Absolutely the right call by the league. There were rumors that he would only sit out one playoff round, but that would not have been enough. They took Simon and made him an example. He may be too old to play again next year, so this may be it for him.

As far as the excuse that he was concussed on that hit? C'mon Chris; we would have to have been concussed to believe that excuse. The simple fact is you got up from the hit, had enough time to find Ryan Hollweg, take your stick in the air and line-drive it right into his chin area. It makes his entire apology useless. What he did was absolutely shameful to our game. It was worse than what McSorley did to Brashear and possibly even what Bertuzzi did to Moore, because most of the impact on those hits came from the receiver's head pounding the ice. Most of the damage was caused by Simon on this play; frankly, I wouldn't have had a problem with the NHL never letting him play again.

Remember, this is not Simon's first infraction. He's been suspended for elbows, cross-checks, and making racist comments in the past. This is someone who has played this way forever, and went too far. He lost his right to play for this year.

On to NBC, whom I've been praising for quite a while. It looks as if that praise has to end.

NBC has been dropping games that were crucial to the NHL's playoff race. Wanna get rid of St. Louis-Columbus on March 25? Go ahead, I don't think even Ken Hitchcock would notice. But March 4th's dropping of Carolina-Atlanta was already too much. Now, they've decided to lose themselves of April 1st's Boston-New Jersey game and April 8th's NY Islanders-New Jersey tilt.

Say what?

Now, there are numerous reasons why this is absolutely ridiculous. First of all, you're dropping three big markets, so it screws with NHL business sense. Second, these are key games in the NHL's playoff race. The Bruins and Isles will be fighting for there playoff lives those afternoons.

Finally, what else do they have those weeks? Detroit-Columbus and Los Angeles-San Jose on the first, and Chicago-Dallas with Buffalo-Philadelphia on the eighth. Oh boy, cannot wait.

NBC may be giving us great playoff coverage, but their regular season coverage needs to step up next year. By the way, how many Devils fans will think that this is just the Meadowlands' last chance to mess with them? The game on the eighth is New Jersey's final home tilt in The Swamp, and now it'll likely be moved back three hours because of NBC.

Biggest bust since the trade deadline: Bill Guerin. Zero points in six games since the deadline. In fact, there have been very few real big payoffs from the blockbusters on deadline day. Ryan Smyth has one goal in five games as an Islander. Peter Forsberg has six points in 11 games in Nashville, and three of those came in one game against bottom feeder Los Angeles. Keith Tkachuk and Alexei Zhitnik have played well, but this may very well turn out to be the year where GMs gave up too much and got too little in return.

-SFM-

February 28th Column

It's hard not to talk about what we witnessed in New Jersey and New York and Ontario this week. It is hockey in its element. Not a forced exposition of two team's skating until someone hooks the opposing player, goes to the box and watches a puck deflect in the net because no one can cover the slot. What they did this week, as author/3-time Oscar Nominee Greg Wyshynski said, was "Let hockey be hockey."

Puckheads, we can no longer pretend that what Larry Brooks calls the "6th Avenue League" is working after seeing this. This was hard-working hockey, regardless of the score, be it 6-5 or 3-2. I think that kind of action is something we can absolutely support going forward.

Looking at one set of games in particular, the Battle of the Hudson River, it's easy to see why the Rangers are struggling. It's just another episode of Jaromir being Jaromir. It's bad enough that he phones it in eight times a season whenever No. 20 in red and black lurks in the shadows. Now he has a shot to redeem himself. Go win the skills competition for us. My captain, my captain! Win us a freakin' game!

Fans in DC, is this kind of play beginning to look familiar?

Jagr is simply giving up. He sees the writing on the wall. He knows he can't lead the Rangers. Tom Renney made a huge mistake in declaring a moody, free-skating scorer his captain. It'll be Renney who likely pays the price if the Rangers fall any further this season, but can JJ be that far behind outta' town?

Best Trade: How can it not be Montreal, getting young Josh Georges and a 1st-rounder for Craig Rivet and a 5th-rounder? Bob Gainey has now completed what Dane Cook calls every gentleman's dream: Being part of a heist. Now, San Jose made the necessary upgrade to its blueline, but when Georges and Souray are combining for 110 points a year on the backline, Rivet will be long forgotten in the Bay Area.

Worst Trade: The Rangers deciding that Aaron Ward was the problem and not, as previously mentioned, Jagr. You need character players like Ward if you're going to do what New York should be doing: rebuilding. Getting only Paul Mara in return for him is inefficient.

Is the Isles trading Robert Nilsson and Ryan O'Marra and a 1st-rounder for Ryan Smyth really that risky of a deal? O'Marra's rumored to be quite the hot head and supposedly, according to many NHL experts, will be a journeyman at best. Nilsson's been in Nolan's doghouse, barely able to crack the Islander lineup, when about 20 guys in the same first round of his draft have made big strides. A 1st-round pick, if Smyth gets the Isles over the hump, will not be that big a parting gift in the end.

More importantly on the dealing of Captain Canada, where is the new NHL logic in this? The Oilers can't afford to keep Smyth because of monetary constraints? The purposes for Gary Bettman's lockout just keep dropping like flies. This economic stability is sure working out.

Speaking of economic stability, 11 of the 24 American NHL teams received revenue sharing last season. None of the Canadian teams did. This according to Edmonton Oilers president Patrick LaForge during an interview with Canada's Sportsnet. Apparently, many Canadian teams paid into revenue sharing. According to the Toronto Globe & Mail, this ranged anywhere from $3 Million-$12 Million U.S. This compounded by TSN analyst Darren Dreger claiming the Canadian teams, all six of them, made up for 33% of the NHL's revenues last year. All of a sudden, Gary Bettman's happy American dream doesn't look so great, does it?

Watching TSN in Canada's coverage of the trade deadline simply shows us how much Versus just fails to get it. Fine, you don't want to devote the 8 hours to the deadline that TSN did on their airwaves, that's OK. But, c'mon, coverage from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., or even 3 p.m. 'till 5 p.m., would be serviceable. Even if you don't want to do that, how about 30 minutes before your game that night to talk about the deals that went down? No sir. Jack squat. NHL.com, almost admitting that they were getting the shaft, simulcast TSN's TradeCentre07 on the website. The NHL continues to lose out when its American fans want it the most.

-SFM-