Barry Melrose Makes His Return to ESPN

I’m going to skip talking about a certain classic of winter for a moment to talk about someone near and dear to this blog. We’re on Winter Classic overload anyway at FanHouse, so if you need an injection of that, the good folks over there can fill you in.

Today is a milestone in television history, it was Barry Melrose’s return to ESPN and our television sets. There’s no coverage of it on ESPN.com, YouTube and the rest of the blogosphere (I admit, I only took a quick glace so email me links if you have them!) so that’s why we’re here tonight.

This afternoon after the classic was over, I caught Melrose and Matt Barnaby doing their thing with one of the anchors on Sportscenter. They were dissecting the winter classic and, aside from Melrose calling Claude Julien a “slam dunk” for coach of the year on ESPN News (does anyone watch that channel?) it went rather well. Scripted, but well. Not that what either commentator had to say was scripted, but their turns at yelling over the highlights — yes, yelling — were almost timed. Melrose did his best John Moschitta Jr. impression trying to get all his thoughts in before Barnaby was supposed to chime in.

We’ll have to see how this dual color commentator thing works out. They’re both good guys and good at what they do, but we’ll see if they can work together. If anything, maybe ESPN will bring back NHL2Night since they’ll need some place to put everyone — Bucci, Melrose, Barnaby and I guess Linda Cohn can come too. OK, that was the left over egg nog kicking in. Oh well…

And I have no video or anything from today, and you know how much I love videos, so send those in if you have them!
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