No, Seriously: Up Yours Basketball

I know that the NCAA Basketball tournament is what makes money, and makes people money all the same this time of year and that's good and that's fine.

It can't touch the NCAA Hockey tournament. Can't do it. It's not possible and it'll never be possible.

Ever.

I'm not going to go throwing the "parity" word around here, that's just too overdone for me.

Before I get talking about how unbelievable Day Two of the tournament was, I want to say that part of me wants to rip ESPN a new one for their abysmal priorities in coverage and inability to handle multiple live broadcasts. ESPN was airing a Maryland-Virginia regular season ACC lacrosse game this afternoon, figuring that for a Saturday, getting as much live sports coverage in as possible would be great.

I like that and that's good. What I don't like is the seeming lack of a backup plan from the folks at ESPN considering that lacrosse games don't end in ties and in the event that the game might go to overtime, you'd need to have a contingency plan just in case.

ESPN2's coverage of the Northeast Regional was delayed until after the second period because the lacrosse game went to an unprecedented seven overtime periods.

SEVEN!

Since I was at this game, I only became aware of the issue with ESPN thanks to friends texting me looking for updates since ESPN was only giving periodic highlight snippets during the lacrosse game and asking for patience.

Don't get me wrong, I dig lacrosse. It's a great sport and I love watching the championships. I've got no beef with lacrosse.

I've got a beef with the decision makers who decided that not having another of their cable channels was worthy enough to carry the UND-UNH game while Maryland/Virginia lacrosse played out the longest lacrosse game in history. Picture in picture would've worked out well also, but instead it was all or nothing.

If these were both NCAA Tournament games being played, fine you gotta roll with it and deal.

But a regular season game?! That's dumb, even more so when you've got folks tuning in for an elimination game, an NCAA Tournament game and you're telling them, "You know what? Too bad." I could delve into crazy theories and pile on ESPN again about their more than apparent disdain for hockey as a sport, but I'm not going to do that this time.

This was a flat-out poor decision to not use the wealth of programming options you have available to you to at least give folks a channel to switch to in the meantime while history in another sport played out. Instead, actual college hockey fans get shut out and cold shouldered while they miss the first period and a half of what turned out to be the greatest game of the tournament.

It's late here and there's a lot of things floating through my head and there's no way that it's going to be said coherently and that overtime thriller with New Hampshire and North Dakota did something to me.

It left me unable to put into words what I just watched.

I'm not going to blow it up into a life changing experience kind of thing, that's just histrionics.

I will say this though:

This game between UNH and UND is the game I'd show to people who are on the fence whether or not they can get into hockey. This is the sort of hockey game I want to see each night played in every arena in front of every fan and soon-to-be fan alike.

If that didn't win them over? Tell them the Bemidji State story. They were technically the worst team in the tournament, only getting in there thanks to winning the CHA Tournament auto-bid. They got a date with Notre Dame in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a reward and made the best of it by handing the Irish their lunch. Their reward for that? A date with the rough and tumble Big Red of Cornell who stunned #2 seed in the Midwest Northeastern scoring the game winning goal with under 30 seconds to play.

Surreal.

All of it.

With Bemidji and Cornell facing off for a date to D.C., another #3 or #4 seed will be headed to join fellow #3 Vermont and #4 Miami. Meanwhile in the East, top seed Boston University gets to face their Hockey East mates from UNH, the #3 seed in the region. The winner of this game gets a date with Hockey East cohorts Vermont for a spot in the Finals.

It's amazing that only one top seed survived the opening round. It's thoroughly shocking and completely enthralling and it's great for the sport. Just last year in Denver, I found myself and others complaining that it's always the same bunch of teams trading off spots in the Frozen Four. You could pick out any combination of Boston College, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota or North Dakota and generally get two or three teams in the Frozen Four.

Not this year though. This year is special, a true "anything can happen" kind of year.

It's the kind of year the NCAA Basketball tournament wishes it could get and market the hell out of.

Too bad. It's hockey's turn to tell the Cinderella stories.

Someone Gets It

Adam Thompson, I'd like to thank you...and curse you a little bit.

I thank you because, unlike many hockey writers, you seem to get it. I know you're a Wall Street Journal writer, and the WSJ isn't exactly known for being a great sports writing haven - but you, my friend, have hit it square on the head. In fact, you must be a reader of this blog part of the time. Case in point:

The league and union ought to swallow their pride, retreat from a few markets
that have consistently failed to gain traction – the NHL remains an afterthought
in Nashville and South Florida – and, for the love of all things decent,
permanently table any talk of further expansion to hockey hinterlands like
Kansas City and Las Vegas. A game already taking positive steps would look even
better with a more concentrated talent pool free of talent-poor fourth-liners.

Fantastic paragraph. It's straight to the point and hammers home that the league as it is now is a bit diluted. Of course, my argument that Herr Bettman helped that along by following John Zeigler's starter-mission of collecting expansion fees is the root of the issue, but that's neither here nor there right now.

The inspiration for the piece appears to be ESPN signing CBC's Don Cherry to provide playoff analysis. This is rather curious since ESPN got out of NHL broadcasting after the lockout. Well, what I meant was Herr Bettman decided to show those lousy upstarts at the Worldwide Leader of Sports who was boss, especially after just about every anchor and commentator on ESPN opted to make fun of the league during the lockout rather than report the news in a mostly objective manner. He decided to show them up by jumping on board the Outdoor Life Network bandwagon.

Another ace decision from the fearless leader.

The way I see it, ESPN wants another bombastic personality on board to get fun quotes and potential ridiculous antics out of. At the very least they'll get ridiculous suits from Grapes and should the Finals turn out to be Detroit and Pittsburgh, they might get some of the xenophobic maniacal verbage I'm sure they're hoping for. A Cup Final with two teams heavy on talented Europeans would make the very Pro-North American Cherry go out of his mind, especially Detroit whose captain hails from Sweden (Nicklas Lidstrom). You could also bank on Cherry hammering away on the fact that a European captained team has never won the Cup.

That sort of talk is a long way off, however.

If anyone is looking at this move as anything resembling ESPN trying to get back into the hockey game, they're sorely mistaken. Bettman, begrudgingly, makes good points whenever he's grilled about turning away from ESPN. Sure, he privately and semi-publicly grouses about the treatment the league got during and after the lockout, you can't blame him for that. He also points out that the NHL wouldn't get the kind of prime treatment he's looking for out of ESPN. You'd likely see the NHL be a mostly ESPN 2 program and since the NHL would be competing for airtime on the network with the NBA, NFL and college football and basketball...well, I think we all know where hockey would rank out in that pecking order - probably about on par with the Arena Football league.

Now, ESPN is all about the big personalities. Bob Knight doing NCAA Tournament coverage is a prime example of this. He's a big name, he's got no qualms about sharing his opinion and he's not a made-for-TV pretty face either. He is the game, he is reality. Same thing with Don Cherry.

That said, Cherry's opinions and antics on CBC are must-see-TV in Canada and there's no one on TV in the United States that can come even remotely close to caring about hockey the way Grapes does and there's not a guy at ESPN that loves the game nearly as much, save for perhaps John Buccigross. For this reason alone its worth it to bring Cherry to sports fans in the USA, its a shame it has to happen on a network that shrugs off the NHL so badly.