NHL KNOWS HOW NOT TO PROMOTE ITS MAIN EVENT
On the day between games of this great Stanley Cup Final — the quality of play, intensity, settings and storylines have exceeded all expectations — a player named Ryan Carpenter is sitting behind a microphone at the podium in the interview room and I want to scream out a question.
“Who the hell are you and what are you doing here?”
It wasn’t a shot at Carpenter, per se, who is almost as unlikely a participant as the teams playing for the Cup. He grew up in Florida, went to high school in Orlando, played for the Sioux City Musketeers before getting a scholarship to Bowling Green, which is everyone’s favourite university in this championship series.
I didn’t say a word, to be honest. But in my head, I was screaming again at the NHL, at my 24th Stanley Cup Final, still trying to understand what it is about this league that it can’t seem to comprehend how to pull off a big event.
Alexander Ovechkin says big event. Marc-Andre Fleury says it in both of Canada’s official languages. Evgeny Kuznetsov leads the playoffs in scoring and was a giant and surprising figure in Game 3. John Carlson led all NHL defencemen in scoring during the season and now leads all defencemen in playoff scoring.
William Karlsson scored 43 goals for Vegas and heads up a big line that consists of nifty Jonathan Marchessault and the clever passing of Reilly Smith.
What did these players have in common on Sunday afternoon? None of them were made available to the media.
Ryan Carpenter, part-time player, with no goals in 16 playoff games, got podium time. So did Luca Sbisa and David Perron, who shared a podium the way Carpenter did with sort-of-Vegas captain Deryk Engelland. Combined goals for the four players in this post-season to date: 0.
Imagine an off-day in the
NBA Finals, with Steph Curry and LeBron James not available but the league substituting Quinn Cook and Jose Calderon in their places.
Imagine the screaming.
It may cause ESPN to go off the air for an entire afternoon.
But we don’t have to imagine it because we know better. The NBA makes James available every day, three times a day on game nights. There is none of this “have to protect the stars” mentality. The NBA is built on their stars, by their stars, for their stars.
The Stanley Cup Final is the participation ribbon of big time sporting championships.
And the hockey media, so used to being slapped in the face, takes the annual slapping, grouses to themselves about it, and carries on.
I’ve covered 20-something Super Bowls. The routine for Super Bowl week is basically the same. If you’re Tom Brady, it means you are talking Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, most of that on podiums, but in between you’re doing your 1-on-1 network obligation interviews. You’re being Tom Brady, biggest star on the biggest stage.
Same way LeBron and Curry and Kevin Durant play that role in the NBA Finals. The same way the starting pitcher of each game in the World Series has a news conference the day before he starts and another one after the game he starts. That has been going on almost as long as the World Series has been around.
There are fewer newspaper people covering the Stanley Cup Final than before. Part of that is the state of the newspaper industry. Part of that is because it’s expensive to cover an event that usually takes two weeks and involves many flights. And the later starts mean it’s more difficult to get stories in the paper the day after games are played.
Which is why the off-day stories matter so much.
It’s why you want to hear from Ovechkin, to tell you what this means to him, with the Capitals two wins away from the Cup. It’s why you want to talk to the best Vegas players, who looked wobbly near the end of Game 3, and you’re wondering, is this team finally out of gas? Or maybe you want to write about Karlsson’s remarkable ascent from nobody to star, or get in on Marchessault’s story of how he bounced from team to team before this dream season in Vegas.
The best story at the podium Sunday: How T.J. Oshie and
Matt Niskanen took public transit to Game 3. That was it.
I asked the usually informative Brooks Orpik to compare what it’s like to have played with Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby, to compare their games and their personalities. His answer amounted to a mouth full of food while still chewing. It was incomprehensible. I was later told Orpik hates podium interviews.
I don’t hate podium interviews. I just hate the wrong players being there in an event that is as special as this one has been to date. And I wonder why it is the NHL doesn’t seem to care about this as much as I do.