At 10:00 AM, I turned on SportsCenter. Yesterday was an exceptionally dramatic day in the sports world, consisting of the face of baseball announcing he will call it quits this season, the Richie Incognito/Jonathan Martin fiasco publicly reaching a new low, a wild buzzer beater in Pittsburgh, and of course ESPN's bread and butter LeBron James hitting a game winning 3-pointer in the late hours of the evening.
All these booming stories and the headline of the morning is...HOCKEY?!?!?!
I must be dreaming. Today's episode began with coverage of Team USA's 7-1 rout of the Slovaks in the opening game for both teams. ESPN will go full shows without even mentioning the sport during the NHL Regular Season. They give Barry Melrose (their only TV hockey analyst) anywhere from 2-3 segments a week to review a couple games and what's going on in the hockey world. Nowhere near the time they spend talking about other major professional and college sports.
The National Hockey League does not receive the nation-wide following other sports get and only becomes the top story on SportsCenter during the playoffs and the Stanley Cup Final. Champions in other major leagues are dedicated most, if not all of the showtime, while last year the Blackhawks got about five minutes. And it only gets a few minutes to be covered because it competes with the attention the NBA Playoffs are getting, and to ESPN that is no contest.
Thank God the NHL doesn't run the Olympics. They are the only way the sport of hockey can attract attention to itself. People love it, get excited, and the sport becomes more popular. The Super Bowl, World Cup, and Olympics are in a class by themselves. That is inarguable.
I am not naive. I know the NHL, in areas in the South is not even considered a major sport. But the NHL is to the South as NASCAR is to the North, and plenty of national attention is given to auto racing.
We all know why the NHL is singled out. ESPN promotes the events it covers more than others simply because they are a business and want to make money. The more people that watch their broadcasts, the more valuable their network is. The statement that defends this argument the most is the fact that Women's College Basketball is a more important story than the hotter than hot battles for playoff spots in the NHL. With all due respect to the great female athletes of the NCAA, you cannot seriously tell me they produce a more popular game than men's professional hockey. Gary Bettman and the NHL thought it would be better to not to stick with ESPN and their overwhelming control of the sports world. And since then began an outcast of not the sport of hockey, but the just NHL.
The Harris Poll recently released a study showing football and baseball with the majority popularity, 60 percent of fans saying one of them (NFL, NCAA football, and MLB) being their favorite sport. Auto Racing, the NBA, NHL, and College Basketball all being within four percent of each other, another argument to ask why the NHL is treated differently.
Something that will be very interesting to see is how ESPN will treat NASCAR when it no longer covers it and will hand over its broadcasts to NBC Sports.
A perfect scenario would be Team USA bringing home the gold and giving the most possible attention to a sport that could use it. We can only hope. The dream continues Saturday 7:30AM EST against the Russians.
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