Mo, mo, maybe blown Leafs' OT goal call shows Canadian telcos' error of their Rielly, Rielly cheapskate remote broadcasts

Joe Bowen misidentifying the winning goal scorer in the biggest Toronto hockey moment in 19 years and MLB editing Oakland A's highlights reminded us how corporate media is failing you, The Fan.

Joe Bowen, doubtlessly, would say the goal gaffe is 100 percent on him. That is not informed by knowing him personally, but by knowing how broadcasters put the onus on themselves to get it right on the spot, and never-ever-ever blame outside factors such as telco giants Sportsnet and BellMedia/TSN being too small-town cheap to pay for radio broadcasters to go on the road, even in the playoffs.

The Toronto Maple Leafs radio voices, Bowen and analyst Jim Ralph, have been commentating remotely for three seasons, long after it was necessary due to COVID-19 health protections. The obvious shrug-off is obvious; that is plenty of time to adapt to describing and analyzing how the Leafs are getting on from TV monitors. So, no, they might say, that was not why Bowen initially gave credit for the team’s biggest goal in 18 seasons to Morgan Rielly when The Captain, O My Captain John Tavares actually fired in the sudden-victory series-winner against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday night.

The fact of the matter, though, is it did happen, and it shortchanged the listening public. The two telco giants, as Sean Fitz-Gerald delineated 2½ weeks ago, decided to be “consistent with the regular season, with games being called remotely through Round 1.” The two media giants even sent “identical one-sentence messages” to Fitz-Gerald for his article on 13 April. Hey, that is why you employ teams of communications professionals: so everyone sounds exactly the same.¹

That article reported that it costs around C$10,000 to send a crew on the road. Rogers cleared over half a billion dollars last quarter. So did BCE, which owns 70 percent of TSN, according to its most recent earnings report. It is a low five-figure sum versus a mid-nine figures sum.

What happened, then, was entirely predictable to anyone who is, pun intended, remotely media savvy and has a working B.S. detector. Tavares’s shot ricocheted into the net off the skate blade of Tampa Bay defender Darren Raddysh, who was occupied by Rielly in the goalmouth in front of the fortress with limbs that is Andrei Vasilevskiy. The broadcast cut to a tight shot of Morgan Rielly, and that was where the narrative went…

Bowen: “They score! They score! Holy Mackinaw, they score! Morgan Rielly! Mo, mo, mo, Rielly! The Leafs have won it! They’re goin’ to the second round!”

Rielly was central to the Leafs winning the series and killing the lowest-hanging fruit on the hockey joke tree. But he had not touched the puck during the entire sequence. And Brendan Burke of the NHL on TNT correctly credited the goal to Tavares. So did Chris Cuthbert on Sportsnet, because their employers had them in the arena.

Since Canadians always apologize on behalf of their corporate overlords without even being asked, one can already hear that just as easily could have happened with the broadcasters on-site, batted out from a thousand knees jerking toward a thousand touchscreens. We know they were not there, the goal scorer was wrong, and Joe Bowen gracefully pivoted by actually breaking into song.

That this happened after a cheapskate decision by Sportsnet and TSN to continue the remote radio broadcasts should not be lost on anyone, even if one of the local content farms that picked up on the miscredited goal call failed to mention it. However, laughing it off lets the telcos off the hook for dereliction of duty with making the enjoyment of live games as inclusive as possible.

The inconvenient truth is that this is what happens when capitalism is enclosing on everyone and everything. The people who control the delivery and the content want to see how much they can get away with doing as little as possible.

Terrestrial radio is dying, so a media exec makes the easy call to have Bowen/Ralph, or Blue Jays radio broadcaster Ben Wagner, call away games off a monitor in Toronto. Or the highlight of an Oakland Athletics home run is cropped to remove “anti-ownership sentiment” and is only restored by MLB Advanced Media after some public pushback.

Pointing out the extent of the corporate capture of our fun and games is hardly new. It is not novel to note how Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd. (MLSE), Rogers, TSN, and all the major sports franchises are all allied and partnered. It is practically state-owned media.

However, a sports vertical such as MLSE, while private by definition, both presents and functions as a quasi-public service. They rely on public resources — such as government funding for a new arena, or using police officers for crowd control — to increase their equity. So, sorry/not sorry, Sportsnet and TSN, but a good audio-only broadcast is part of the package even if it hurts quarterly profits by 0.002 percent.

Their selling point to get the public to care is that the teams are creatures of the sports culture. How often have you heard that a legacy sports team such as the Leafs is a public trust? Perhaps no one really believes that anymore, but a rainy Sunday rant should never go to waste.

That means including the public who care in spirit but have obligations and priorities that do not involve meeting the price points for getting access by buying tickets or cable subscriptions. Those fans still count for myriad reasons. They are the ones who are part of a big win carrying sports beyond their normal market reach. And just because someone isn’t a paying customer today, that does not mean they will not be one in the future. They might need more described audio, might be away from a screen due to work commitments, or simply want a slightly different narrative provided by a radio broadcaster.

Translation: put the radio guys on the road even if it does serve short-term-ism, and there will likely be a windfall for you!

The traditional role of the radio crew in sports is to provide a perspective that differs from the professional detachment of someone calling the game for a national TV audience. They should be able to draw insights from their access to the athletes; the players having their own bypass route thanks to social media makes that hard enough to do already, without having to stay home for half of the schedule. They can also carry the hopes and desires of the fanbase. They provide the ongoing story; something beneath TV, which tends to be all surface.

Sportsnet and TSN have been taking half-measures with that, and need to get called on it. The rant, you can likely tell, is far from 100 percent about Joe Bowen, just like it was really not about him with the misidentified Maple Leaf hero on Saturday.

What else — Round 1 observations, from and for the extremely caszh NHL fan

‘Rules experts’ on TV add to the NFL-ification of hockey

Be it resolved: any sport that requires a “rules expert” in the broadcast booth needs to -un-caulk its gameplay. Evolve by simplifying, man! The name of the game is action, and a former official in a suit explaining the minutia of penalty calls ain’t that.

Football telecasts, both NFL and college, are now gummed up by the “let’s bring in our rules expert” device. It has crept over to hockey on the U.S.-originating broadcasts, and it takes away from the enjoyment of the product.

That is a layer of the bigger challenge of how to improve NHL officiating. It might come back to the inherent problem of having four officials sharing the ice surface at the same time as 10 fast-moving skaters and two goaltenders.

A number of years ago, one broadcaster who called games at the NHL, minor pro (AHL), and beginner pro (OHL) levels pointed out the inherent problem. The first and the latter used the two-ref, two-linesperson system. The AHL sometimes used the old-school one ref, two lineys system. He found the AHL games were called more consistently — less hesitation by the solo ref, and fewer instances of the officials having to move to avoid interfering with the play and perhaps missing something.

So the solution might lie in some combo of tech and rethinking the number of officials and their roles. The above-linked piece by Greg Wyshynski notes that the NHL is close to having “an optical tracking solution that would add a significant amount of new data about body and stick positioning.” Whatever can be measured can be improved, and that might be welcomed.

Otherwise, as Lauren Theisen recently put it on The Distraction podcast, complaining about officiating is the “lowest form of hockey commentary.” Everything evens out, eh.

Colorado’s Cogliano somehow played a period with a fractured neck

In the immortal words of Francine Dunlop, “Oh my god, I’ve forgotten.” The dirty plays and the black/white interpretations of them can really get one out of the mood of watching the playoffs.

There should be some focus on how it was possible that Colorado forward Andrew Cogliano returned to a recent game with a fractured neck, sustained when he was checked illegally by Seattle’s Jordan Eberle. Wondering how Cogliano was cleared to return is not playing Doctor on the internet.

Of course, the focus has been on how Eberle was not called for a reviewable major penalty and was not suspended for the winner-take-all Game 7 on Sunday. But the more uncomfortable question is just hanging there.

An all-CHL alumni goaltending matchup? In this stage of the playoffs? Localized entirely within the Pacific Division?

The hoopla manufacturers hyping the Edmonton-Vegas series do not need a note about the local angle of the goalie matchup. The Oilers’ Stuart Skinner is a hometown 24-year-old kid. The Golden Knights’ Laurent Brossoit spent his beginner pro years from 2009 to ’13 with the Edmonton Oil Kings, who are part of the Oiler Entertainment Group. Both of them backstopped a team to the Western (WHL) league title (Skinner with Swift Current in 2018, Brossoit with Edmonton six seasons earlier).

The unspoken part about that is why it might seem rare that a goalie matchup in the ‘last eight’ to have two alumni of the Canadian Hockey League. The cost of playing youth hockey in Canada, and the arms race by parents to stack the best kids together on the same teams, has hurt goaltending development. One also wonders how many players are set back by being taught pro techniques before their bodies are ready, which raises the risk of overuse injuries.

The proof is in the fancy stats. None of MoneyPuck’s top 10 goalies in goals saved above expected (5-on-5 play only) came through the Western, Ontario, or Québec league. The top CHL grad was Philadelphia’s Carter Hart (Everett, WHL) in 11th place. Four others made it into the top 20 — Skinner in 14th, Montréal’s Sam Montembeault in 15th, Seattle’s Philipp Grubauer in 19th, and Minnesota’s 38-year-old Marc-André Fleury in 20th.

(No wonder the NHL Players’ Association has not been more strident about holding more best-on-best tournaments. The rank-and-file of the union membership are Canadians, and they know how thin we are in the net.)

The longer development arc that goalies have relative to forwards and D-men is not simpatico to the conveyor belt of developmental hockey in Canada. The CHL comes up too late in the game to correct that, but it can help in one small way: exempting goalies from the overage rule, which keeps teams to three 20-year-old players.

It creates incentives at both ends. Goalies would not be in a hurry to go to the CHL. That extra year can make the difference. Case in point: Darcy Kuemper, now with Washington, who was the goalie of record for Colorado in its run to winning the 2022 Stanley Cup. Kuemper played under-18 hockey in his age-16 season instead of being someone’s backup. And he had an overage season in the Western league. That is a convenience sample that shows how the CHL model needs one small tweak.

There is still a triumvirate of games 7 to come!

Oh, right. Florida-Boston and Seattle-Colorado on Sunday, New York Rangers-New Jersey on Monday. Well, one never knows when the muse will strike, so I had to get something up. There will be plenty of time to mull how those results affect the Leafs.

That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.

1. Sportsnet and BellMedia/TSN split Leafs radio broadcasts 50/50, just as they have an identical stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment Ltd.