Third Round Confirmations

So the third round got underway yesterday and, as expected, broadcasting executives and NHL schedule makers didn’t really throw fans any curve balls (pardon the baseball pun). As anticipated, NBC elected to go with the all-American matchup between San Jose and Chicago twice but was also forced to reluctantly accept one game between Montreal and Philadelphia. CBC, for its part, is covering the entire Canadiens-Flyers series and, as I forecasted, is opting to go with Bob Cole in the booth. As for Jim Hughson, he will work the Sharks-Blackhawks series beginning with game four, after TSN concludes its coverage of the first three games. Now that TSN doesn’t have multiple series to cover, Chris Cuthbert will work alongside Pierre McGuire for the specialty channel’s remaining broadcasts – which just goes to confirm my much earlier belief that it should have been Cuthbert as the network’s top play-by-play man, and not Gord Miller, calling the Canadiens-Capitals in the first round.

The Montreal Canadiens have heavily impacted TSN’s playoff coverage this year. In the first round, it was the presence of the Canadiens on TSN that gave the specialty channel its highest hockey ratings in the network’s history. But the continued presence of the Canadiens – now on CBC – has since had the opposite effect for TSN. The specialty channel has not yet released its ratings for the second round, but one can only imagine that they won’t come close to what CBC has been reporting: A whopping 4.239 million watched game seven between the Canadiens-Penguins on CBC alone, with another 2.417 million watching on French-language RDS – that means there weren’t too many people left to watch game six between the Flyers-Bruins on TSN, which aired at the same time as game seven of the Canadiens-Penguins series on the other networks.

And the news doesn’t get better for TSN. The Canadiens are still alive in the third round and will still continue to rack-up ratings for TSN’s competitors. Even more frustrating for the specialty channel, two of the three games it does get to broadcast in the third round start at non-peak times – a Sunday afternoon at 3 o’clock and a Tuesday night beginning afterhours at 10 o’clock. CBC, on the other hand, will have the Canadiens at 7 o’clock each night – except for Saturday, when the game will be played in the afternoon to accommodate U.S. television. Notwithstanding the bad foot on which the playoffs started for CBC, the public broadcaster has to be pretty happy with how things have since turned around.

TONIGHT'S GAMES:
No games scheduled