HUMBLE HEROES
Sedins set for curtain call at the Rog
There is no bringing back the long stretch of the first period many Vancouver Canucks fans missed Tuesday night because of a Toronto Blue Jays broadcast scheduling mess.
But a day after the programming debacle that incensed Vancouver hockey viewers, Sportsnet president Scott Moore admitted his network really screwed up.
“One of the cardinal rules in television is you don’t leave a live event before it’s over,” he said Wednesday on the phone from Toronto. “With the special circumstances in Vancouver, we made an exception to it, but we probably waited too long.”
Tuesday ’s game between the Vegas Golden Knights and Canucks started in Vancouver at 7 p.m. The telecast was slated for Sportsnet Pacific.
The problem for Sportsnet was the program before the NHL contest was a Blue Jays-Chicago White Sox game. The Jays won that Major League Baseball matchup in a 14-5 blowout that ran long.
“The plans certainly were in place to be able to deal with it, but what we didn’t expect was the slow game with the Blue Jays,” Moore said.
That meant frustrated Canucks fans couldn’t watch the game or the second-last performance at Rogers Arena for Henrik and Daniel Sedin, who announced Monday they were retiring at the end of this season.
Sportsnet activated its Vancouver Hockey companion channel — which is often used early in the season when there are overlaps with playoff baseball, for instance — but the late change didn’t get through to many viewers.
“The power of social media did make us aware of (the problems),” Moore said. “I choose to look at it as reinforcing what we knew, that there’s gigantic interest in (tonight’s) game.
“In hindsight, we probably should have moved the opening of that game to a channel that’s a little more broadly distributed. Hard-core fans know about our companion channel, but casual fans don’t.”
Tonight, the Canucks-Arizona Coyotes game will be shown coast to coast.
There’s a special pre-game show, and Sportsnet’s features department has put together a special package on the Sedin twins.
“We’ve been planing for three months on the possibility (of the Sedins retiring ),” Moore said. “Our features group has been working very hard. We know how great the Sedins have been for ( Vancouver) and we want to reflect that.”