I've Heard Good Things

Tremendously Tremendous : The Greatest Hockey Game You Never Saw

bestrooftalkever:

soupsoup:

While NBC was airing “Ice Dancing,” their sister network MSNBC was airing one of the most exciting hockey games in recent history. It didn’t take a genius to figure the matching of the home host Canadian team taking on a surging USA team would be a compelling matchup. NBC realized the error of their ways too late, cutting off the two-man bobsled to capture the final moments of the match, but it was too late, they already missed a golden opportunity.

Throughout the game, twitter was flooded with viewers buzzing about the match, so much so that “NBC” and MSNBC were trending topics, mainly based around people calling out the network for not airing the event on their main network, along with “Ryan Miller,” the USA goalie and “Team USA.”

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the network who decked Conan O’Brien in favor of putting a well past his prime Jay Leno back in his old time slot would make such a colossal programming blunder. The network has enjoyed record ratings thus far, but the lack of live events have frustrated viewers. In the age of the internet, you would virtually need to shut off your digital life in order to prevent yourself from finding out the results of what NBC decides to air hours later, in prime time. Twitter becomes a spoiler landmine and many found out too late to turn off their New York Times breaking news email alerts.

Here NBC had an a chance to capture an audience that would follow this USA hockey team to the medal rounds, and all in real-time. Instead, it they committed a crime of poor programming, enough to throw them in same MSNBC Lockup that normally airs weekend evenings and preempted in favor of men’s hockey.

I wasn’t so critical of NBC for this. MSNBC is widely available in over 80 million homes, it has an HD counterpart, totally necessary for great hockey and there is wide precedent for keeping the hockey on the sister channels in the prelims, and it doesn’t ultimately impact ratings for later stage games.  Americans aren’t the biggest hockey fans over all, so those that wanted to watch the hockey live could, and those that wanted the ice dancing, ski cross and bode miller got their fill as well. Just an awesome Sunday night at the Olympics. I don’t see it as the major blunder that soupsoup does.

That being said, it was an incredible game. I’m not the hockey fanatic that some of my good friends from Buffalo are, but you know a great game when you see one and it doesn’t come much better than last night. Phenomenal game play, Miller’s a wall and while Canada dominated the ice, they couldn’t shut down Rafalski. It must be a formidable blow to the Canucks moral to not get the bye.

Stay tuned to more action from Vancouver, after the jump*.

*No jump this time. I just like the phrase.