Like many hockey fans, I was happy that hockey was back this year. I didn’t care that ESPN didn’t renew its television contract with the NHL; I thought OLN might have a few hiccups, but overall they would do just fine. I made a mistake. OLN has been a mess all season and it’s not getting any better.

I understand that they had never done the NHL before and only had a few months to hire announcers, cameramen, build a stage, etc. But worst of all, they have not improved or learned from their mistakes. The broadcasts are still as mediocre as they were on opening night.

After watching the first weekend of the 2006 NHL Playoffs, these are my thoughts:

• Camera angles are mediocre at best. The camera of the first 10 minutes of the Red Wings vs. Oilers Game 1 zoomed out to the point where he could see all of the ice. This would be great except that it’s IMPOSSIBLE to see the disc or read a jersey number (and no, I’m not watching it on a 13″ TV). They fixed it a few minutes later, but are these the things that? Shouldn’t they have figured out how to film a game at Joe Louis Arena during the regular season?
• Jack Edwards shouldn’t be doing play-by-play for nationally televised playoff games. I miss the days of Gary Thorne/Bill Clement and Steve Levy/Darren Pang on ESPN and ESPN 2.
• Speaking of Bill Clement, he’s not a studio guy, he’s a color commentator. Next season, he’s looking for a studio guy so you can move Clement back to the booth where he belongs.
• Not OLN’s fault, but not having another network (ie ESPN 2) hurts the fans. We used to watch two playoff games at once, now we have one.
• The score takes up too much space on the screen at the top. Do we need to see giant logos of each team at all times? All it does is take up space and force OLN to put a black bar at the top of the screen to fit the logos, wasting more space. Good luck trying to find the drive when score updates and ads pop up (which is quite often) taking up even more space.
• With two minutes left in the Red Wings vs. Oilers game 1, with the score tied at 2, the camera went black… for at least thirty seconds. This is unacceptable. Period.
• The second game of the doubleheader on Friday, Anaheim vs. Calgary, it was ‘additional coverage’, meaning OLN just aired the CBC feed. Weak, weak boys. What, you can’t afford to send more than one camera crew a night? Maybe the NHL should have given coverage to a network that could handle it (of course, if the NHL hadn’t demanded so much money from ESPN, we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place).

And that was just the first weekend of coverage. It’s going to be a long playoff season…