Arrogance For No Good Reason

Allan Muir of Sports Illustrated, one of the last bastions of American sports media even remotely paying attention to the NHL, decided to snoop around a little bit about the Versus/DirecTV dispute that’s just starting to get noticed.

Muir’s article doesn’t show you too much more than I brought to light here just the other day but it does bring us the beauty of showing the NHLs view on the matter, courtesy of NHL spokesman Frank Brown.

When asked Tuesday if the league was concerned enough to involve itself in the process, NHL spokesman Frank Brown simply pointed to the calender.

“Today is August 25. The next NHL telecast scheduled for VERSUS is Oct. 1,” he said.

Real nice, eh?

Yes, there’s a lot of time to go here and what will be really telling is whether or not this gets done before college football season begins for Versus since more people care about seeing their favorite college football team get their air time than they do about the NHL.

Muir does state in this write-up that it’s a game of big business “chicken” and Versus has a lot more to lose in this thing than does DirecTV so playing hardball with them won’t work.  It is a bit mystifying to see something aside from the company line from the NHL on this matter and I won’t lie, I’m eager to see what the NHL would do if Versus continues to hold the line and DirecTV tells them to go play in traffic.

Please let this happen, please let Gary be forced to intercede in this dispute and then botch it up even more.  I pray to you Big Baby Jesus to allow this to happen.

Please make it happen Big Baby Jesus.