I've had a problem watching the Detroit Red Wings this year: that the local broadcast by Fox Sports Detroit has become completely awful.
The past few years I've subscribed to hockey packages that allowed me to watch any team's broadcast and learned the various nuances of many teams' local broadcasts. So I feel like I have some idea of what makes a local hockey broadcast good, average, or mediocre.
This year I didn't subscribe to any of those packages or subscribe to the cable package that provides the NHL Network and thus am relying on NBC Sports and Fox Sports Detroit for my NHL hockey. And as far as Fox Sports Detroit is concerned, it hasn't been anything worth watching. In fact, I've put the games on mute several times.
Here are some of the problems off the top of my head:
The Intermissions
The panel of Johnny Kane, Darren Elliot, Manny Legace, sometimes Chris Osgood, and even once Dave Coulier has not been very good. Local intermission talk is often mediocre for local broadcasts, so I can manage that even if this intermission panel has been pretty low bar. Plus the intermission is a time for productivity anyway.
However, Fox Sports Detroit has been doing live look ins of their intermission this year. They literally turn on the cameras on the host and commentators/analysts as they talk about what to talk about next or are just having a random conversation. Maybe it was funny and quirky the first time. But it seems to happen twice each intermission, and is awful. I'd honestly rather watch a commercial.
Plus/Minus
I've been a hockey fan since the 90's. Even then, broadcasters regularly talked about how plus/minus wasn't that great of a statistic as it can be completely random due to luck and being such a small sample size. Two decades later it's absolutely irrelevant apart from fantasy hockey leagues that still use it and that you can find it on the NHL's website, where you can find just about any statistic. There are many better stats that do what plus/minus was supposed to do such as Shot Attempt Differential (a,k.a. Corsi or Fenwick). Nobody talks about plus/minus anymore.
Nobody except for the Red Wings, that is. Ken Daniels and Mickey Redmond discuss it multiple times every game, usually when talking about how great of a player Dylan Larkin is. There are so many other and better stats to tell us that Dylan Larkin is a special player. It's ridiculous.
It should be noted that this isn't just Fox Sports Detroit here though. The beat writers that cover the Red Wings also use plus/minus as if it were still a relevant statistic. But that's another story.
Ken Daniels Doesn't Fact Check
There were two instances in the December 5th game against Nashville where Ken Daniels stated something as a fact, when it in fact was not true.
The first was when discussing Nashville forward Cody Hodgson. Daniels said something along the lines that Hodgson was bought out by Buffalo because he didn't want to play there anymore. That's simply not how/why buyouts happen. Players get bought out because the team decides they would rather pay the player and suffer a cap hit for the player to not play for them than have the player in their lineup.
The second was when talking about the rookie scoring race. Daniels repeatedly stated that Larkin was second in rookie scoring, while Arizona's Max Domi was first. This completely ignores the fact that both players are behind Chicago's Artemi Panarin. Maybe he meant goal scoring, but then he forgot to mention that New York's Oscar Lindberg was at the time tied with both players. You can find this information right on the NHL's site.
Mickey Redmond Talking about Fighting
Look, this is a bit of heated topic right now. But the facts are that fighting is diminishing in the NHL largely due to the fact that we now know some of the very serious dangers of repeated head trauma.
The other day though Mickey Redmond got excited over a fight between Brendan Smith and Arizona's Kyle Chipchura. Redmond's an old-time guy and he likes fighting. Okay. But then he showed a fight between Bob Probert and Tie Domi, asking rhetorically multiple times, "Isn't that good stuff?"
You can find the comments beginning at the 3:59 mark of this YouTube video uploaded by awood40.
The problem isn't that Mickey (and Ken Daniels) got excited about the fight. The problem is Mickey suggesting that Bob Probert's fight was good stuff.
Bob Probert died of heart failure at the age of 45 in 2010. He drank heavily (not sure if it was ever diagnosed alchocolism) and used cocaine. His brain was donated to science after his death, and it was discovered that he suffered from CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. It's unknown how much of Probert's problems were due to the disease, but easy to speculate. You can read more about it here.
The bottom line is that it's not a happy story at all, and looking at some of the things that led to the tragic ending and cheering about them seems distasteful at best and repulsive to me.
The Bottom Line
The Detroit Red Wings have been a fascinating team to watch this year.
For the first time in ten years, they have a new head coach who is quite young but brings with him an impressive track record. They have a teenage rookie who looks like a star. They still have one of the most exciting players ever to play the game in Pavel Datsyuk. Detroit still calls itself HockeyTown. They have a lot of young and exciting players breaking into the league or developing into go-to guys. They struggled to begin the year, but have been dominant recently.
I think that as an organization, they should want as many eyes watching their product as possible. Having at least an average local broadcast would go a long way to helping with that.
