Tonight, 56,000 people will pack Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta to watch the Edmonton Oilers play the Montreal Canadiens. It's a regular-season NHL game like any other, save for one detail- it's being played outside, and in -17C conditions. Oilers team officials have said that they received 275,000 ticket requests for the game. Of course, if you live in the US, and if you're not a huge hockey fan, you'd never know that ANYTHING out of the ordinary was happening. Why? Because it will not be shown in the US unless you can pick up Hockey Night in Canada on your satellite dish. ESPN & ABC are contractually bound to broadcast (yawn) NCAA football, so I'll have to wait to see the highlights on SportsCenter. Let me just state for the record that I am NOT happy.
My friend Chris Schroen eloquently expresses a degree of frustration that closely mirrors my own:
Dude, I'm pissed that tomorrow's "Heritage Classic" in Edmonton won't be on TV in the States. It's such a huge event that even Barry Melrose on ESPN said he was having trouble obtaining tickets, and we won't even get to see it on TV. NONE of the ABC/ESPN conglomerate of TV networks could find room for it.
Not even ESPN Classic, ESPN HD-Net (or whatever it's called), ABC Family, Disney Channel, Soap Net... not one freaking channel. MAYBE they could have found room for it if the Rangers, the Flyers, or the Red Wings were one of the teams involved, but even then, I wouldn't bet on it.The league can pretend whatever they want to, if it makes them happy, but this reveals the truth about hockey in the USA: most Americans simply aren't
interested. Period. There's nothing wrong with that (people don't know what they're missing, but "de gustibus non disputandum est"); it's lamentable but
obviously true.
Indeed. No wonder "Iron Chef" gets better ratings in this country than the NHL. Until Gary Bettman and the league's marketers pull their collective anterior out of their collective posterior, the NHL will continued to be viewed as a second-tier sport in the US. Is it any mystery why the NHL is in such dire financial straits these days??
