The Broad Street Blog

Unfor­tu­nately for the fans, and poten­tial fans, of the NHL, today’s game between the Fly­ers and Rangers was cov­ered by NBC and the dynamic duo of Mike Emrick and Eddie Olczyk. The Fly­ers dom­i­nated the Rangers for most of the game, but not once did either of those morons or Mike Mil­bury dis­cuss the strength of the Fly­ers play. To them, the ONLY rea­son the Fly­ers got out to a 5 – 0 lead was the poor play of the Rangers, not the strong and dom­i­nat­ing play of the Flyers. 

Just like Fox’s won­der­ful Joe Buck had a story planned about how the young Tampa Bay Rays would beat the Phillies, it was appar­ent that Emrick and Olczyk had their story planned how the New York Rangers would beat up their divi­sion rival the Philadel­phia Fly­ers. But when that story did not unfold, it was clear they were upset, con­tin­u­ally talk­ing about what the Rangers needed to do to get back in the game. Ana­lyst extra­or­di­naire Mike Mil­bury spent the first inter­mis­sion angrily berat­ing the Rangers for their poor play and failed to men­tion that their for­tunes may have been dic­tated by the Fly­ers play. Pierre McGuire and Milbury’s com­pet­i­tive “analy­sis” and down­right bick­er­ing with each other was enough to turn about any­one off. White noise is more palat­able than the quar­tet of Emer­ick, Olczyk, McGuire and Milbury. 

Com­pletely biased announc­ing dur­ing national broad­casts will not help the NHL gain fans. Near the end of the game, when a spot came up for NBC’s cov­er­age of next Sunday’s Penguins-Capitals game, one of the idiots said some­thing to the effect of, “Well, that should be more excit­ing than this week’s game.” Really? A 3rd place team tak­ing on a floun­der­ing 10th place team is going to be more excit­ing than a game between two divi­sion rivals who are both in the play­off hunt? I found this game excit­ing, watch­ing my team trounce a hated rival. Fox seemed to find the Eagles’ 44 – 6 slaugh­ter­ing of the rival Cow­boys on Decem­ber 28th excit­ing. The NHL on NBC is still terrible.