The Toronto Maple Leafs lost Game 1 on the road, because hey, all the home teams were winning Game 1. Then the Vancouver Canucks lost Game 1 because all the home teams were winning Game 1 … except Vancouver.
Sigh.
The odd stats of the night is both Toronto and Vancouver scored the first goal in their games, normally a sign of success. The stat that the San Jose announcers kept throwing out was that 68% of the teams to win Game 1 win the series.
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The NBC Sports Group decided to stick us with a C-minus crew for the Maple Leafs playoff opener in 9 years. Rick Peckham (Tampa Bay) and Joe Micheletti (New York Rangers) are Eastern Conference announcers with some to moderate national experience.
If Peckham and Micheletti had just been able to call the game as themselves, they might have been OK, but not annoying. But they had to keep to the NBC script.
The script called for Zdeno Chara to stop Phil Kessel, and Peckham gave Chara credit at one point for stopping Kessel, even though the culprit was Dennis Seidenberg.
While the Leafs did have a lot less playoff experience than the Bruins, that point was pounded home at every possible turn. Yes, Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson probably touched on this, but their approach would have been more subtle. Peckham and Micheletti were more like cilantro than basil.
"Both these teams have physical play" was another common theme. Yes, Toronto is a team that hits, but they don't hurt people like Boston tries to do. To Peckham and Micheletti, the teams hit with equal force; again, sticking to the script.
To show the force of Milan Lucic, NBC found a nearly 5-year-old clip showing Lucic slamming an unidentified Toronto player into the boards, shattering the glass. This was a pointless exercise, but stuck to some element of a script that was sponsored but never fully explained.
NBC prides itself on taking time to talk to the coaches during the game as part of its coverage. At the 8:51 mark in the 1st period, Micheletti talked with Boston Coach Claude Julien. Micheletti never talked with Toronto Coach Randy Carlyle.
Toronto snapped a 9-year playoff drought, and this is how NBC treated the Maple Leafs. The NBC Sports Network cancelled the scheduled Leafs games this season, and the NHL Network didn't show a single non-HNIC Leafs game all year.
The Leafs are an actually interesting story. Too bad that story didn't fit the NBC script. Watch how Jim Hughson and Craig Simpson do their jobs in Game 2, and hopefully beyond.
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We get where the NBC Sports Group will likely keep the CSN-California sim sub rather than use the TSN national feed for the Canucks series. But this continues an ongoing pattern where the U.S. outlets won't use TSN.
The NHL Network wouldn't use TSN feeds during the season for rebroadcasts. During the limited free previews of NHL Center Ice, TSN feeds were avoided. You could find a TSN-local feed but only when both teams were Canadian.
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CNBC aired the anthems in Boston in part because the NBC Sports Group produced the telecast. We got no anthems from CSN-California. Good to see them show Boston doing the anthem, but Vancouver's version is one of the best, and their a cappella singing has been going on for some time.
The NBC Sports Group should let the anthems go on the air, especially in Vancouver.
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Montréal and Ottawa will feature the CBC feed, but the in-between period coverage will be handled in the U.S. studios. Based on what we saw, the coverage will be brief and insignificant.
You can check out the regular segments, especially Coach's Corner, at cbcsports.ca.
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