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You're going to have to cite your sources if you want to make blanket statements about American announcers being terrible, especially when Hockey Night in Canada featured the grating Jim Hughson for so many years. The series from the book I was particularly irritated about was the Pens-Isles series from that year. For the Pens you had Mike Lange, possibly the greatest hockey play-by-play man of all time (though I'm admittedly biased), who had a flow that was simply unparalleled. For the Isles you had Jiggs McDonald, who isn't my personal favorite but who you can't argue against personally since he, um, did games for HNIC. And for the national broadcast, such as it existed at the time, you had Gary Thorne, who also had a flow the Canadian guys just can't seem to match and had plenty of his own iconic calls as well, especially on ABC in the early 2000s. The larger point is that nobody who actually cared about the Pens or the Isles was watching the HNIC broadcast, except possibly Ray Ferraro's parents. I want my sports books to capture the emotion of being an actual fan, not the disinterest of someone watching what is essentially an out of market broadcast.
As for Fox and the glowing pucks, I wasn't a fan of them either, but it wasn't because they thought Americans were incapable of keeping up with the game. When Fox started getting major league sports packages in the mid 90s they experimented with a number of broadcasting ideas, some of which fared better than others. They were also the first network that thought fans of any sport were apparently incapable of keeping track of what the score was; now it's unthinkable that this information wouldn't be displayed on screen, along with the time and time left in the penalty and other information we used to just have to guess at. In this respect the NFL is actually worse, since they keep adding more shit on the screen every year, starting with the first down line and going from there. Glow pucks were an early attempt at doing the same thing that wasn't as well-received. There was also NBC's idea to show a football game with just a stadium announcer that everyone hated, and Fox's disastrous decision to put Jimmy Johnson and Terry Bradshaw together as two color guys. The idea was to see what it would be like to casually watch a game with two guys who knew a lot about football, but it didn't work out. These days, though, you have stuff like the Manning brothers broadcast and the Ryan Whitney broadcast so I guess the idea was just too far ahead of its time.
Edmonton won't win a cup in the foreseeable future because they haven't figured out that you can't put your superstars on the same line. Especially when one of them is a center. There's a reason the Pens won three cups — when you have Sid on line 1 and Geno on line 2, it doesn't matter if you're feeding the puck to Chris Kunitz or Ruslan Fedotenko or fucking Max Talbot. But no, they load up their first line with superstars and as soon as you run into a team with a first defensive pairing that can shut them down in the playoffs you're in trouble. And even if you can't shut them down, they can only play 20 minutes a game. Then they've got Nugent-Hopkins on line 2 who's fine by himself but by God why do you put him on your first PP too? To intentionally cut the PP scoring in half? The rest of the team is scrubs and has-beens. Defense and goaltending are decent but not stellar. They might make the conference final, but overreliance on offensive firepower killed many a team. This is why the Penguins traded John Cullen in '91 and Mark Recchi in '92.
Source: Me, after living and breathing hockey for a decade and a half growing up and then moving to America as an adult. Maybe things are different in Pittsburgh, but watching games for the local team in one of the smaller hockey markets (i.e. outside the original 6 and the midwest) was excruciating. Announcers were explaining relatively basic rules, clearly had no grasp on the strategy, positioning or how the game is played and just shoutcasted goals.
Even in Boston, if you go to a Bruins game the presumably CTE-riddled fanbase seems to operate on two principles: if a Bruins player has the puck, yell SHOOT THE PUCK at the top of your lungs. If the other team has the puck, yell HIT HIM. If the Bruins lost, it's probably because they didn't shoot the puck enough.
I grant that things may have been better in Pittsburgh.
I mean, maybe I just fell for the Canadian 'hurr durr America dumb' propaganda, but it sure seems a lot of people talked about it that way:
I watch far from every Edmonton game, but I'm pretty sure they've experimented with splitting up Draisaitl and McDavid a few years back and I don't think it went well for them. At that point, you can trade Draisaitl for some depth I guess - but man would it take some massive balls to try and explain why you traded one of the top scorers in the league and one half of the most productive duo in the NHL for some solid second-line players.
Kane and Nugent-Hopkins should be able to match Geno on paper. But maybe I'm too deep in the hopium. Perhaps McJesus was the false prophet all along and Brock Boeser will bring Lord Stanley's cup back to the motherland.
The Pens won three cups because they had a hell of a lot more than Crosby and Geno. Letang and Fleury were pretty damn good too, and Kessel was on an eldritch hot-dog fueled rampage just to spite the Leafs (which I fully approve of).
Dude, their defense and goaltending are ass. They averaged over 3 goals against this season with a franchise record winning streak. But they're also fucked by cap space; how are they going to improve their back end without trading their stars? See comment above about massive balls required to trade some of the best scorers in the league.
All that said, I'm just a meathead who played a lot of hockey growing up and beer leagues as an adult. I have no idea what makes a good NHL team, but thankfully, that seems to be fairly universally true. See the Golden Knights for the entirety of their existence, somehow this year's Canucks.
I know about 'fool me once' and 'fool me twice' -- who should be ashamed over 'fool me four times'?
Your recollections of the comet-puck and American announcers do match mine -- to this day there are radio play-by-plays of hockey games in Canada, I wonder if this leads to a better talent pool?
Also Cherry still seems to be putting out podcasts:
https://doncherrysgrapevine.podbean.com/
Not something I would normally listen to, but maybe I'll give one a try to see how demented he is! As far as I can remember he pretty much always talked like he does in your clips -- maybe it's a sort of Trumpy thing where you need to be on his wavelength?
It's true, I played one for a minute and he didn't sound half bad.
My record of listening to Cherry is pretty sporadic. He seemed much more coherent in some of his older legendary rants I've listened to, but I definitely wasn't a tune-in-every-week kind of guy.
Huh, are you one of those rootless millenial types? Just that in my formative years, you were tuning in to Cherry every Saturday night whether you liked it or not. Something something neuroplasticity, foreign languages.
Not entirely sure what you mean by this, but my family and childhood social groups slowly scattered over the last decade or two as Quebec continues to hemorrhage anglos. I had to move a couple of times for grad school, but I have a family/house and I've been in the same city for the past five years or so.
Oddly enough I don't think anyone I knew growing up would watch Don Cherry or even hockey games that regularly. But then, I was also the only kid in the advanced class that played a sport, and I was never that close with any of my hockey teammates so could just be a function of my social circle.
It was just an age joke -- kids these days don't know what it was like to have TFC [1] as their only source of television. But you probably had more than that in Montreal. :)
For vast swathes of rural Canada in the 70s/80s, Saturday really was Hockey Night in Canada, even in the unlikely event that you didn't really care about hockey -- and if you were watching that you were watching Don Cherry in the second intermission.
[1]Two Fuckin Channels
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