TOE-PICK!

Um... long time, no post.

Just want to let those of our loyal readers Stateside know that my tax dollars are being used to fund the most ridiculous (and awesome) reality show ever: The Battle of the Blades. (Sorry, vids restricted by geography - you'll, uh, have to resort to creative means to find them...)

Take an ex-NHL player. Add an ex-pairs/ice dance figure skater. Make them do their thing Dancing with the Stars style.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Stanley Cup Finals: What is wrong with NBC?

What is up with NBC's lighting during the Stanley Cup Finals? Ever single game on NBC this series has been on the verge of being unwatchable, and I'm talking Fox Sports Network unwatchable. If I wasn't a hockey fan I would not watch these games. Each game (and each period) starts out perfectly fine. But as the period goes on, the lighting in certain parts of the ice become so glaringly bright that you cannot even see the lines (red line, blue line, circle, and faceoff dots) painted on the ice.


I noticed that in Detroit the glare is at center ice, but in Pittsburgh the glare is at each end, with the "home shoots twice" end having the most glare. I haven't read any complaints on the blogosphere and I'm trying to figure out why no one else has mentioned it. After the first two games in Detroit I thought it could have been my TV but the next two games in Pittsburgh that were televised on Versus were lit well. The following two games on NBC, one in Detroit and the other in Pittsburgh, had the same glare issue. You may think that the whiter the ice the better it is to see the puck, but the ice isn't just whiter, there's a glare to it so that the puck gets momentarily lost as it moves through the "glare" zones. Has anyone else noticed this problem??

(x-posted to Purple Crushed Velvet)

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Ersberg in Directv Commercial

Not sure if this commercial is national or only shown locally but Erik Ersberg is in a DIRECTV commercial.

I don't know how long it's been on the air but I first heard about it today from my fiance and I saw it today when I was watching an episode of 'Friday Night Lights' that I recorded from last Friday. First Aubin, now Ersberg. How many other Kings goaltenders are in the pipeline to be in a commercial?

And speaking of 'Friday Night Lights', Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton have got to be the absolute best married TV couple. They are amazing together on-screen. And how many of you got teary-eyed when Tim Riggins realized he lost his best friend to the NYC? It's so heart breaking watching Tim Riggins get emotional.

x-posted to Purple Crushed Velvet

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Eastern Migration

(Cross posted at No Pun Intended!)

I bumped into this post over at Battle of California earlier today and it got me thinking. Despite that whole growing up with the Leafs thing, I consider myself very much a Western Conference fan first and foremost - that isn't to say I don't care at all about the East, but I certainly would have been just as miffed if this had happened to, say, a Wings game because VS wanted me to see no one but the Penguins (no offense, Elly/ie and Teka!) during the two and a half hours they were playing.

The same thing happened earlier in the year when a Wings/Ducks game going to a shootout resulted in the first seven or eight minutes of the following Dallas game not being shown, so the "VS has a stupid crappy EC bias" argument doesn't really hold up, but it still left me curious about the VS schedule in general.

Last season, which was before I moved past the stone age and found myself the joys of Centre Ice, it felt like every non-Wings (and therefore televised by VS) game I watched was an EC match-up. I lost track of how many times I saw the Pens and the Capitals go at it again, but I chalked it up to my bias rearing its ugly head and not VS'. Still, I was prompted to go look up just what the numbers were, and there results were interesting.

Over the course of the season, VS' current schedule lists 56 NHL games in which the teams are already set (one other is still TBA). Of these:

• 34 are EC match-ups
• 19 are WC match-ups
  
• 3 involve one team from each conference (Pittsburgh/Minnesota, Detroit/Montreal, and Carolina/Nashville).
  

Separated by number of times each team is featured on the network the numbers look like this (color coded by conference):

• 9 times: Pittsburgh
• 8 times: Colorado, Philadelphia
• 7 times: Buffalo, Detroit, NY Rangers
• 6 times: Boston
• 5 times: Carolina, Montreal, NY Islanders
• 4 times: Atlanta, Dallas, Washington
  
• 3 times: Anaheim, Minnesota, New Jersey, St. Louis, Toronto
  
• 2 times: Chicago, San Jose, Tampa Bay, Vancouver
• 1 time: Calgary, Columbus, Edmonton, Florida, LA, Nashville, Ottawa, Phoenix

Looks a little skewed, no? And annoyingly so, to me, obviously - is the East really that much a monopoly on the interest of hockey fans right now? Thank god for Center Ice (without which I, like most US hockey fans, would be stuck with only my local Wings broadcast and VS) or I'd be one seriously cranky hockey fan right now.

(And you know, I understand Detroit being so high up there, considering the turn out the Wings get in arenas across the country has led to things like the Coyotes jacking up prices when we're in town, but...Colorado? Really?)

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