Tim Noonan
It's an annual rite of panic for many Canadians in Hong Kong. They look at the calendar, see May turning to June and realise, damn, it's Stanley Cup final time. Sadly, what should be a high point in their life has become a mortal blow to their pride and a pretty painful kick in the southern extremities for many Canadians because the championship of the National Hockey League (NHL) is now down to two teams competing for the iconic cup and nobody around here seems to care whatsoever.
But if it's any consolation, it's not just Hong Kong where nobody cares about Canada's national heirloom. Even in some of the locales that have won Lord Stanley's Cup recently, hockey is a notch below pillow fighting on the sports scene. If nothing else, the plight of the devalued NHL should serve as a cautionary tale to one and all: sell your soul at your own peril.
The NHL did just that and hockey's insignificance has been on display for all to not see in the past few weeks. The finals between the Ottawa Senators and the Anaheim Ducks are such poor TV fare in the US, including the greater Anaheim area, that only the most intrepid viewers can find them. In Canada, where six of the 30 teams in the NHL play, the Stanley Cup is the blockbuster bonanza of the TV programming season.
In a pathetic and shameless bid to get the league on more American TV screens, the NHL agreed to schedule play-off games on Saturday afternoon if NBC, one of the big US networks, would please just show a few. So NBC, which paid next to nothing for the games, rescheduled a couple of tractor pulls and monster truck galas for a much, much later spot and managed to squeeze the NHL showpiece in.
A pivotal conference final game between the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators was moved from Saturday night to Saturday afternoon. But there was only one problem. In Canada, the most popular show on TV is called Hockey Night in Canada, not Hockey Afternoon in Canada.
This meant little to the NHL, though, which merely shrugged and intimated that Canadians could close the curtains and pretend it was dark outside if they wanted to enjoy the game like they usually do.
The game in question turned out to be a stellar affair that was tied after regulation and heading to a tension packed sudden-death overtime. Ah, but NBC had other priorities. Without warning, the network switched to a pre-race show on the Preakness before the puck was dropped in overtime. Hockey Afternoon in Canada stayed with the game, naturally, but fans in Buffalo and the rest of the US, who spent three hours watching, missed Ottawa win in overtime.