"Un but! Vokoun est completement supris!"

I just had a marvelous time watching the Montreal Canadiens top the Nashville Predators, 6-5, in a shootout. The trick was the broadcast the Center Ice feed had was from RDS--the French langauge station. No idea why there was no English feed, but I wanted to see newest Predator Petr Forsberg, and to root against the Preds overtaking the Red Wings in the standings. I could only catch bits an pieces of the commentary, but it was fun nonetheless. And I could read the on-screen promo that some form of food deal was given to fans because the Candiens scored five goals.

Yeah, that French minor was good for something, at least.

Fourteen years, four bankruptcies, three franchise moves, two lockouts, one lost season and no effective leadership.

Yeah, that about sums it up.

Gary Bettman has been poor to awful for the NHL. Perhaps it's not all of his own doing--I certainly wouldn't blame him for the FOX broadcast inanity, such as dueling goal robots--but he certainly has been on watch for it, and needs to go.

The thing that has always annoyed me about the broadcast situation is how every other sport gets to build its audience with national weekend broadcasts, starting at some point a ways into the season and continuing until the end. Hockey? Everytime they swing a network deal--FOX, ABC, NBC--it's 5 games, non consecutively, and then playoffs. Even if they have to take a hit in the per-game rights fees--or hell, subsidize it--they have to get on every weekend, so viewership can drop in, get interested, and come back at some point, even if it's not the next week. What they do now doesn't help grow the fanbase one bit.

Hockey Close-Up

We got really good seats (below face value) from Stubhub for the 1/9 Capitals vs. Flyers game. No doubt they were being dumped at the last minute because the Flyers are awful this year. Anyway, you can see from these pictures from Julie's cell phone how close we were--that's Kolzig on the left, and the face-off dot directly in front of us. We were about ten rows back for a nice 6-2 Caps win.



I like to splurge on lower-bowl seats once a year, if I can. There's nothing wrong with watching hockey from the "cheap" seats, but there's something to be said for being able to see faces shmushed into the glass, as well. And the speed is even more incredible up close. Now, if the prices more adequately reflected demand and quality of product, so that more people could get a look at the game, maybe the game could re-establish footholds and be in position to take Mark Cuban's advice.