My Friends at Comcast SportsNet:
On behalf of the entire OFB team, I want to express appreciation for your enthusiastic support of OFB and Washington’s hockey blogs, and convey my team’s anticipation for your coverage of the Caps in 2008-09. It’s our view that on a number of fronts SportsNet markedly upgraded the breadth and caliber of broadcast coverage of the Caps and hockey for the region last season, and we anticipate bigger and better things from you this season, during what may well be the most anticipated Caps’ season in team history.
Today, however, I’d like to share my concern with the thorough dropoff in hockey coverage on Comcast this summer. Please regard my reflections as aiming at strengthening an already strong broadcast product; Comcast SportsNet is home to knowledgeable and devoted hockey experts, and the outlet’s in-season coverage of the Caps is something the area’s hockey fans ought to take pride in. Your Caps’ page is terrific looking and deserves more credit for the quality of its content as well.
Around the time that SportsNet signed off from the NHL Entry Draft in Ottawa in June it more or less seemed to sign off on covering hockey for the summer, save for a brief blip (Day 1) from Capitals’ Development Camp in mid-July. Of course it’s not that there’s a frenzy of activity in hockey in July and August generally (the region’s hockey blogs slow considerably then as well); I guess my hope was to see, amid the predictable and necessary local media Redskin frenzy, very brief, very modest remembrances of last hockey season wedded with high-octane marketing messages for the new one. A few mere broadcast morsels might have gone a long way to carrying over the feel-good vibe for hockey that SportsNet so successfully cultivated last spring.
Specifically, I wonder if something more might not have been achieved with the novelty of Anton Gustafsson’s selection by the Caps at the June Entry Draft. We in Washington following the draft on TV caught one or two engaging interviews with father and son in Ottawa, but nothing substantive followed. The Gustafsson family charm — to make no mention of the novelty of the moment — seemed to beg for more broadcast product.
The younger Gustafsson’s selection really is an amazing moment in Capitals’ hisory, when you think about it. His father Bengt of course ranks among the most accomplished players in team history. He’s also one of the most accomplished coaches in international hockey, having won gold at both the Olympics and World Championships — in the same year (2006)! In June he watched his son become a first-round NHL draft pick — picked by the same club with which he fashioned a distinguished NHL career.
This very special hockey family easily could have been the subject of a special, in-depth Comcast feature. I’m imagining something like a 30-minute program — much like the one you guys produced for the Capitals’ 2006 Entry Draft — Capitals Under Construction. This time, however, the feature’s focus could have been on one draft pick and his family’s distinctive link to Washington’s hockey team.
How remarkable such a feature could have been had it melded footage of father dangling and dazzling in his classic old Caps’ sweater in the NHL’s ’80s brand of firewagon hockey with contemporary footage of son Anton just emerging as a world-class talent in Sweden’s professional ranks. The feature might also have offered the reflections of one or two or three long-time NHL scouts (European ones, perhaps) offering their comparative assessments of the games of father and son. It might not have been a bad idea, either, to solicit the views of long-standing Caps’ season ticket holders, who could have shared their reflections on father while also expressing their eagerness to see the son in action in a Caps’ sweater.
Now imagine if you’d produced such a program and aired it the night before the start of training camp next month, immediately followed by a broadcast of father Gustafsson’s 5-goal game (on five shots!) against the Flyers in 1984. What a welcome to Washington to the Gustafsson family that would have been. The feature program could have aired at least a handful of times during hockey’s quiet months of July and August, and served as a novel bit of nourishment for the region’s hungry hockey fans.
You may realize that beginning this summer many of those fans began tuning in to the NHL Network, now offered on select cable systems about the region, to satisfy their puck-lust. I think it should be Comcast’s aim to retain them all 12 months on the calendar.
Another idea for a fan-friendly feature in summer might have been to sit down with Head Coach Bruce Boudreau not long after his Jack Adams win and explore in depth — again in feature-length fashion — his extraordinary run in Washington last season. You already know how accomplished a story-teller he is; so why not roll the cameras and allow him, removed from the soundbite setting of the in-season arena, to tell his insider’s tale? My prediction is that the editing on your end would have been distinctly minimal. Washington this summer is home to the greatest coach in hockey — but who visiting our city this summer would have learned that while here?
Washington this summer is also home to the greatest player in all of hockey. Beyond Comcast’s producing something substantive such as a feature-length profiles, I also wonder at the absence this summer of quick-hitting broadcast blurbs related to Alexander Ovechkin’s remarkable rise to the very top of his sport. When he had all that hardware surrounding him in his stylish tuxedo up in Toronto in June, you guys asked us for some photos we published of it. Those stills in some fashion should have been aired on Comcast every day this summer, just for mere seconds, so that the tens of thousands of tourists in our town could have been reminded that they were visiting a city home to hockey royalty.
The Capitals today learned that they will appear on Versus, the NHL’s U.S. cable broadcast outlet, a total of seven times during the 2008-09 regular season. NBC has yet to commit to individual broadcasts but will have four possible Caps’ games to broadcast.
For those who live with hockey residing in the soul, every day carries some manner of frozen celebration, even in the dead of summer, but some days are better refrigerated than others. For me there are three or four genuinely dry-ice moments in the hockey calendar that are a given every year: the morning of day one of training camp in September; the morning of the season opener about a month later; and the moment that the NHL commissioner places the team drafting first at June’s Entry Draft on the clock. With those first two events, no doubt I’m joined in celebration by thousands of puckheads across the continent. But the latter?
Fast forward to 1996. The leadup buzz with that draft surrounded a big-bodied, ungodly talented Russian power forward named Alexander Volchkov. (Our good friend JP exercises his inner DraftGeek with 
In reading memorials of his career this week I was struck by the breadth of events he covered. He was ABC’s go-to guy for special events, for decades. He was a seminal media figure at horse racing’s Triple Crown races, and with ‘Wide World of Sports’ he’d anchor one of the most successful sports programs in television history.
