BREAKING NEWS: Flyers-Rangers NBC’s Game of the Week on March 15th… Sigh
March 3, 2009 7 Comments
We hate to be the bearers of bad news, but we’ll do it here anyway. We were told earlier today by the NHL that NBC has selected the Flyers-Rangers matchup to air as it’s Sunday Game of the Week on March 15th at 12:30 PM ET. It was picked over Bruins-Penguins or Red Wings-Blue Jackets.
We hate to be so negative, but this was clearly directly chosen so they could avoid airing the Devils-Bruins matchup on March 22nd. Now, NBC can use the Pens one more time, and that time will be March 22nd when they take on the Flyers. It also means that for the 2nd consecutive season, NBC’s 10 “Games of the Week” will have aired a game featuring the Rangers, Red Wings or Penguins every single week. NBC’s rest of the season schedule is now easily predictable. It’s after the jump.
March 8th, 12:30 PM
Boston vs. NY Rangers
March 15th, 12:30 PM
Philadelphia vs. NY Rangers
March 22nd, 12:30 PM
Philadelphia vs. Pittsburgh
April 5th, 12:30 PM
Minnesota vs. Detroit
April 12th, 2:00 PM
Detroit vs. Chicago
Puck The Media 
A part of me hopes Marty goes into the Boston game with 550 or 551.
Also, featuring the team with the best record in the league (Boston) only once is a dumb move by NBC.
jkrdevil…team with the best record is the sharks and they will not be on NBC once (also a dumb move)
But just look at all that Avery! Why, in two weeks he’ll be famous! Or something.
It’s called marketing, you should read about it some time.
Yeah, that’s some great marketing….paint yourself into a corner so that you only air games featuring 3 teams. That won’t bore the hell out of an audience instantly or anything. If you want to advertise the league, you show the most exciting teams. Penguins and Rangers both suck this yeah. San Jose and Boston are both very good teams that have some flare to their game (see: Blake Wheeler and Devin Setoguchi). The Capitals also have a lot of flair to their game. The Flyers are generally a high scoring team as well. The NHL equates goal scoring to “excitement”. Therefore, the teams that score most often are the teams that maybe they should feature. By that logic, Detroit, Boston, San Jose, and Chicago shoul dbe seeing some Game of the Week airtime. But that’s not going to happen because NBC is lazy and they don’t want to memorize any names west of Pennsylvania unless they have a winged wheel on their chest.
I hate that NBC goes after the Rangers a lot more than they should. ABC did it, and FOX before them did it too. This is where regional coverage helped. I agree with the comment about Marty going into Boston with 550 or 551. That would be a huge disservice to the league if the national TV partner chooses to completely ignore it. And maybe they’ll surprise us.
The ratings are just too low for them to experiment with showing better teams that fewer people, they think, would watch. If I only knew what NBC showed, I’d think the league was about 6 teams wide and only in the eastern time zone.
You really have to wonder what sort of control the New York and Philadelphia markets have over the national media. The continuous, non-stop sucking up to those markets is one of the things that killed hockey on ESPN and now NBC is making the same mistake. If NBC and the NHL want to transform their sport into one with nationwide support, favoring the same two markets over and over and over again ad nauseum is most definitely not the way to do it.
There is a reason why the Boston-San Jose game was the most watched broadcast in Versus’ history. Perhaps NBC would be wise to attempt to figure out why.