NBC has the NHL television contract. So, when the player you’ve decided to make the face of the game (Sidney Crosby) is playing against Team USA in one of the marquee games of the Olympic Hockey Tournament thus far (in prime time nonetheless), what does NBC put on? Ice Dancing. And the US-Canada game? Relegated to MSNBC.
Obviously, hockey isn’t NBC’s #1 priority. But we’ve known that for a while. The Pensblog has done a great job documenting just how little NBC cares about hockey, starting with the treatment (or should I say lack of treatment) headliner hockey games get on nbcsports.com. You would think when you have the television contract for only 1 of the 4 major sports, you would do a little more to promote it. Nope.
This didn’t hit home for us until a few days ago when we were trying to re-watch the Canada-Switzerland game on NBC’s website. We had missed the game when it was originally broadcast, and wanted to go back to watch it because we knew it was a good game. However, when we went to NBC’s Olympics website where you are supposed to be able to watch full event replays, we were shocked to discover that the Canada-Switzerland game featured no announcing, only the crowd/arena noises. Since the game had been on television, we knew there had to be announcers there and that NBC somehow managed to edit out their audio track from the game they put online. This didn’t make much sense to us, so we took our question to Twitter.
These are actual screenshots, but we’ve provided the links as well so that you can see we’re not making this up.
Wait, what?
“Long and boring”
Go ahead, read that again.
An NBC employee, specifically the one they have running their Olympic Hockey Twitter Account thinks that hockey is boring?
WTF?
Seriously, WTF?
In the end, this is the network that trashed Conan, so I guess we shouldn’t expect too much from them. Honestly, if they didn’t have the NHL, The Office, and 30 Rock, there would be no reason to watch NBC.
I think we have someone on our blogging staff that can handle this. Minister of Ire, take it away…
UPDATE: Via comments here and some responses on Twitter, some people have mentioned that it is possible the NBC person meant that the reason was long and boring, not the object in question (the hockey game). We believe this is possible and it may be a case of poor wording. Given that you only have 140 characters on Twitter to get your point across, sometimes things get abbreviated. However, they could have saved space by saying “There’s a long & boring reason” rather than the wordage they used. Additionally, had they said something like “There’s a reason that is long and boring” or “There’s a reason, which is long and boring” it would have been much more clear what they meant. We’ll be the first to admit that this very well could be a case of poor wording. However, NBC stays On Notice for not showing the US-Canada hockey game. And for employing Pierre McGuire.
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