The Ottawa Senators are headed to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time in franchise history, thanks to captain Daniel Alfredsson's overtime game-winner at 9:32 of the overtime period.
What could be more exciting than sudden-death overtime with the Conference championship on the line? Well, if you're
NBC's dimwitted Sports Chairman Dick Ebersol, the answer is obvious: the ponies. But hang on — NBC didn't just cut from the decisive moments of the Stanley Cup semi-finals to the Preakness; they cut from the Stanley Cup semi-finals to
90 minutes of Preakness pre-race coverage. That's right: instead of Alfredsson's clutch goal ending the President's-Trophy-winning Sabres' season, NBC viewers saw a couple jockeys get interviewed and exterior shots of the stables. We're sure that shit was compelling television to someone, but we sure as fuck don't know who.
(At first glance, NBC's decision to abandon the hockey game at the end of regulation, at the very apogee of suspense and excitement, seems like poor planning and bad judgment in the extreme. But in the network's defense, it's true that horse racing has traditionally drawn much larger audiences than ice hockey. By "traditionally," though, we mean "in the 1920s and '30s.")
Ebersol seems to have a real tin ear for sporting entertainment. Here's the guy who, more than any other individual since Roone Arledge, has been responsible for keeping the Olympics on television in the face of steadily escalating viewer insouciance. That's right — the Olympics: that seemingly endless festival of the world's least telegenic sports, not broadcast live, schmaltzed up with idiotic pre-games pageantry and countless nauseating short features about athletes' relatives' struggles with exotic diseases or financial hardship — each vignette a transparently desperate and utterly futile attempt to get us to give a flying fuck which of a legion of obscure jocks gets to the other end of the pool and back first. What a thrill, indeed!
When a network arranges to carry a sporting event, it assumes the responsibility of carrying the
entire event. The more significant the game, the weightier that responsibility. Yesterday's Preakness fiasco was enough to put us off of NBC sports permanently. It was Heidi-Bowl bad. NBC should stick to what they do best these days: sending that smarmy prick Chris Hansen trolling for
pedophiles. If we never see another important NHL game on their network again, it'll be too soon.
Here's a good
Globe and Mail column on hockey's Heidi Game.