I Miss Hockey

Since the NHL "paused" its season, I (often with my mother) have still been able to watch some hockey here and there. NBCSN sometimes has hockey games on, but they of course cover other sports too, and so mostly it's been the NHL Network and Center Ice, for obvious reasons.

The NHL Network likes to do themes, so they'll do a whole bunch of all-star-game-related shows, or a bunch of Winter Classics in a row. Or they showed the games it took St Louis to get to last year's Cup, which, no thank you for me, but I can see the point. Still, I prefer it when they just pick some old random game to show. Some of them are way back, 90s or early 2000s, and we have fun picking out differences to today's game, even above the video quality and square broadcast view: no ads in the ice! Look, he's not wearing a helmet! Wait, how is that not a penalty?!

Center Ice didn't immediately start showing games when the season stopped, but when I checked a week or two later, they were doing some. What they do is pick four games, and replay them throughout the day at set times. At first they were all games from this season, but recently it's been more varied, going farther back. It can be great fun, and since they don't show commercials or the intermission programming, it goes by pretty quickly.

I'd love to know who's selecting which games to show, and why they do it the way they do, such as playing the same game as one of the four options for several days in a row. Of course I wish they'd show the Bruins once in a while, too: it's not that they only play every other team (it's a bit bunchy toward a few teams, like Chicago, and Philly, and I've probably seen the Colorado one where Bourque gets the Cup a dozen times in the last two months), but there has literally been one Bruins game shown on Center Ice since they started this, and the Bruins lost it, so that was less than fun for me. I'm assuming it has something to do with rights, and presumably they don't have NESN's permission (hey NESN! Give them permission!), but there has to be something they could do.

There are also a few games that I recorded for one reason or another: the game Mom and I went to against the Panthers, which seems like a lifetime ago (March 5!), and also the previous game when the Bruins were in Tampa, which I recorded to make sure I knew how to record it. And a few from earlier in the season; wow, do I ever wish I had recorded more of them, but who knew? We watched part of that Tampa game last night, and they're just so business-as-usual, showing the standings and talking about the upcoming playoffs, and everything was so normal. I miss that.