What’s Wrong with TV Hockey?

Watching two of my favorite cities — L.A. and Chicago — go at it so fiercely in the Stanley Cup playoffs, with reportedly “the most exciting games ever,” I am struck by just how unexciting TV hockey is. It’s like going back in time when sports was covered with one or two cameras from the middle of the field.

Sure, hockey moves fast, and no doubt the sports channels don’t want to take the chance of missing something big by showing a replay of something not so big. So, what’s their answer? Show everything, so that, even on HD, we actually see nothing. To augment this, the announcer spews forth in a meaningless drone for a pseudo-play-by-play that also tells us nothing.

TV Hockey needs two things: a John Madden figure to attract us to the analytical side of the game, augmenting our appreciation of the skills required, and therefore our enjoyment of the televised version of the sport; and “tape delay.”

So, you’re seeing the game a few seconds behind “live.” So what? What possible difference could it make? You use that time to show all the missed shots from various angles; to entertain us with actually seeing the puck now and then in close-up shots; to draw on the screen Madden-style to explain some of the cool things that we saw but didn’t really see; to slow down a few of the important moves to let us revel in the athleticism.

Then, if you get too far behind, you can catch up in the twenty-minute rest times, or speed through the parts of the game that are just skating back and forth. NBC, for instance, could conceivably run this alternative version on one of its other channels to test how many viewers want to actually see the game. Or even try it online. A face-off of sports coverage.

It’s time, though, to bring hockey coverage into this century. Overtime.