What the Puck: Will Hockey Night in Canada finally be forced to embrace Canadiens during NHL playoffs?
On Saturday, Hockey Night in Canada relegated the Canadiens game to Citytv, while the lowly Toronto Maple Leafs were showcased as the main game on CBC.
Hockey Night in Canada and their masters at Sportsnet live for the Toronto Maple Leafs. It seems odd given how utterly terrible the Loafs are this season and how little they’ve won in the playoffs in the Auston Matthews era.
But it’s just business. As Grandmaster Flash put it all those years ago — It’s all about money/ain’t a damn thing funny. The biggest audience for English TV in Canada is located in southern Ontario and, sadly enough, the biggest chunk of those folks happen to be long-suffering Leafs fans.
Still. It really is intolerable that the national hockey broadcaster in Canada has, for decades, made no secret of the fact that it’s a Leafs booster. On Saturday, a fellow named Cole Caufield went into the game with 49 goals and if he had scored Saturday, he would’ve become the first player wearing the bleu-blanc-rouge jersey to do that since Stéphane Richer all the way back in 1990.
But no matter, the brain trust at Sportsnet needed to put that oh-so-important — NOT! — Leafs-Los Angeles Kings matchup on CBC, the network that reaches the most households in Canada, because … well because their world revolves around the Leafs. Those would be the same Leafs who are not that far from last place in the Eastern Conference, a team so inept that they can’t even figure out they should get all the way to last place to try to get a better draft pick, especially when they have traded away this year’s first-round pick with only top-five protection.
Meanwhile the Montreal Canadiens, who were on Citytv as usual, are one of the hottest teams in the National Hockey League. You’d think rational minds would put the hotter Canadian team on the network with the largest reach, but then again there is the small detail that Rogers is actually the majority owner of the Leafs.
Umm, this just might be a conflict of interest, no? By the way, Sportsnet can switch up those channels any time they like. They could have put the Leafs game on the lower-rated Citytv and the Habs on CBC, but they chose not to.
In the U.S., with the National Football League and Major League Baseball, they do switch up the games depending on which teams are hot. It’s actually kind of incredible. Just imagine that a national broadcaster in the U.S. — say ESPN or NBC — openly favoured one NFL or NBA team over another to the extent Sportsnet favours the Leafs. It would never be tolerated.
But it’s always been thus here in Canada. Now the broadcasts are run by Rogers and they get to air the Saturday-night games on CBC free, an incredibly stupid deal struck by the public broadcaster who somehow thought it was a good idea to give away prime airtime to a private competitor. (And don’t get me started on how the aforementioned public broadcaster then allows Rogers to air in-program propaganda for sports betting on CBC!).
Back when the broadcasts were produced by CBC, they also had a similar obsession with the Leafs, who were even more of a losing proposition back then, and a disdain for the Canadiens. The main commentator then was a chap you might have heard of, Don Cherry, who made no secret of his animosity toward the Habs (and to everything Québécois). I’ll never forget during a Habs-Bruins playoff series years ago, Ron MacLean asked Cherry to comment on the Canadiens and Cherry snapped back at MacLean — “What are you trying to do? Get me in trouble?” Imagine the guy is so anti-Habs he can’t even talk about them without getting in hot water!
CBC is of course the network, a publicly funded network I should add, that chose not to air the ceremony retiring Bernard (Boom Boom) Geoffrion’s No. 5 sweater at the Forum in March 2006. Geoffrion had died that morning. Instead CBC aired a meaningless Leafs-Tampa Bay Lightning game because … well because it was the Leafs.
Of course Rogers and Sportsnet are going to have quite the dilemma given that come playoff time this spring, there will be no Leafs around to promote and they will have no other choice but to give priority to Canadiens games. At this point, the only other Canadian team almost sure to be in the playoffs is the Edmonton Oilers, though the Ottawa Senators and the Winnipeg Jets also might end up in there.
A source close to Sportsnet said the network will have to decide which team to focus on, either the Habs or the Oilers. The Oilers’ advantage is they have a superstar in Connor McDavid, something Montreal doesn’t (yet) have. The downside for Edmonton is their games are late starts in the east. So Sportsnet might decide they have to send their A team of Chris Cuthbert/Craig Simpson/Kyle Bukauskas to cover the Canadiens.
I’d love to see that, to see Rogers/Sportsnet left with no choice but to push the Habs hard. And what if Montreal goes on a run and ends up as the lone Canadian team in the hunt? Will we start seeing ads on Hockey Night in Canada calling the Canadiens “Canada’s team”? Yeah of course we won’t. Toronto’s collective head would explode if that happened.
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