Ottawa's Team

We here at the Cox Bloc usually enjoy the work of media watchdog and all-around Unblinking Eye William Houston (he's like Cox Bloc + reputation and contacts - tasteless jokes and snark). But yesterday, he dragged an old dead horses out for its yearly flogging:

The time is probably right for Hockey Night in Canada to stop giving the Toronto Maple Leafs countrywide distribution. Through the end of the NHL's regular season, Hockey Night should be thinking about featuring the Ottawa Senators nationally on the 7 p.m. EST telecast.

The Leafs have taken precedence on Hockey Night for years, but as a non-playoff team currently second last in the Eastern Conference, they're contributing little to the telecasts. What's more, Hockey Night will be counting on the Senators, the top team in the Eastern Conference, to deliver substantial playoff audiences.

That won't happen unless the Canadian audience is given an opportunity to connect with the Senators in the regular season.

The problem for Hockey Night's network, the CBC, is that, among the six Canadian NHL teams, the Leafs produce the largest audiences.

"In television, you want immediate results," a TV source said. "But in this case, the CBC should probably suffer in the short term for long-term gains. Ottawa is going to be the CBC's bread and butter in the playoffs, not Toronto."

Now look, I'm all for seeing less of the Leafs - it's much easier to root for them to lose when you don't actually have to watch - but there's some very faulty logic here. Houston is saying that the CBC should sacrifice Hockey Night's cash cow, a team that does excellent numbers no matter how poor their results are, in an attempt to goose the Senators audience.

In essence, he's advocating the Corpse turn HNIC into a bigger-budget version of its other shows - niche television that has to be consistently rammed down our throats in order to produce a respectable audience share. Ladies and gentlemen, your Ottawa Senators - the J-Pod of the NHL!

It's hard to see how this could be productive for the CBC. Canadians certainly had ample opportunity to "connect" with the Senators last year during their run to the Stanley Cup Finals. The Senators did poor numbers then. Why would an essentially unchanged team do any better now? Houston points out that ratings for Senators-Wings were almost comparable to Leafs ratings, even with playoff football on. However, a Sens-Wings matchup is a marquee matchup of the two best teams in the league. Will neutrals tune in to see Ottawa-Boston? And isn't it possible the Sens' ratings were higher than usual cause it was the lead-in to a Leafs game? That's certainly why I had it on.

Switching out the Leafs also might not go over well with Hockey Night advertisers. The chance to connect with a fanatically loyal fanbase which consumes the product with dedication and verve no matter how vile it tastes and how sick it makes you: that's gotta be Molson's target audience right there.

And if CBC does put all its eggs in the black-and-red basket they'd certainly end up with them all over their face if Ottawa collapses in the early rounds of the playoffs. Nahh, that couldn't happen.