Fans have written:

> The
> quality of hockey and desire put forth last night deserves to be showcased
> and if Fox Sports New England won't do it find a station that will
>
> And what had [FSNE] shown instead at 7:00?  NBA Tonight.  So given a choice between
> the HEA championship game and routine NBA action, they choose the latter.  To my mind it had to
> have been a contractual obligation, as it is hard for me to believe that any sports programming
> director with a brain would have made that choice freely.
>

Thank goodness that the hockey was good enough to get excited about.

Much as I'd like to have seen the HE finals live (I missed the OT last night because was too tired
to stay up for the OT, having watched both games in their entirety on Friday night), I think we
need to be a little realistic and understand that the population that's as fanatic about college
hockey as we are is pretty small.

Last night, the Celtics game was on FSNE at 7:30, which was no doubt a contrctual obligation, and
may even be the profitable broadcast programming that supports the less profitable programming
like college hockey.

Actually, we should probably be grateful for contractual obligations.  I'm sure the Bruins would
have preferred to start their game yesterday at some time other than 12:00 noon.  That probably
cost them real money in attendance and concessions.

Making TV deals that showcase your product can be making a deals with the devil.  A few years ago,
all the Beanpot games were broadcast live on AT&T Broadband, so that if you were in that 20% of
the homes in the Boston area that had AT&T Broadband, you got it live.  The other 80% were out of
luck.  I've occasionally seen MAAC hockey games broadcast live, but the camera work is awful --
I've seen better work on broadcasts of youth hockey games on local access channels.  Some of the
minor conference squeakball tournaments have been broadcast live this week -- with games going on
at 11:00 on Tuesday night.

I'm grateful that I was able to watch what I did, and that the production was of reasonable
quality (though Tim Sweeney amuses me, on-camera he's got one of the most brain dead pasted on
smiles I've ever seen).

Clay



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