Last night was far from perfect and I think there are several lessons for the NHL and ESPN to take away from it. But before I get into those, I want to praise them for what was a night of hockey that I very much enjoyed. I watched about 5 hours of completely uninterrupted hockey and unlike most nights where I'm double, triple, or quad boxing there were zero 5+ minute windows where all the games were at intermission. I want more of these nights in my life and don't want these lessons/critiques to come off as complaints. It was a pilot/test run and perfection shouldn't have been assumed.
1: Schedule 8 East vs East games and 8 West vs West games and make as many of them division matchups as possible.. 8 of the 16 games featured a team from the East playing a team from the West and 6 of those 8 games saw an Eastern team playing a team in the Mountain or Pacific time zone. The NHL should do a few of these nights a year and work to base the rest of the season's schedule around these nights. I realize that scheduling is a huge pain in the ass, but I think it is feasible to go all East vs East and West vs West if you build your schedule around 3-5 of these nights each year.
2: Air a double header on the main ESPN channel instead of a triple header. Forcing the triple header by starting game 1 at 6pm Eastern and the last game at 11pm Eastern is a bit much. Only a handful of true psychos want (and are able) to watch 7+ hours of hockey on a Tuesday. Drop the puck on game 1 around 6:30 pm eastern time and drop the puck on game 16 around 10:00 eastern time. That allows games to start every 15 minutes until game 16 has started and gets you out of the worst of the time slots.
3: Way less of the studio on the Frozen Frenzy broadcast. I don't need to check in with the intermission panel from the game that is on the main ESPN channel. The entire point of this broadcast is to avoid intermissions. Stop cutting to them. I also rarely need to see Bucci and Weekes. I should rarely be watching the studio. 90% or more of this broadcast should be a game on full screen, a double box, a triple box, or a quad box. The play-by-play of that game(s) can be turned way down to allow Bucci and Weekes to talk over it (either about that game, scores around the league, or another game), but I should be watching hockey being played almost the entire time.
NFL RedZone perfected this. They rarely cut to a studio shot of Scott Hanson with scores/videos in the background. The scores/videos are full screen on your TV with Hanson talking over it. There were way too many times where there were multiple games in play that would have allowed a live look in but we were instead just watching Bucci/Weekes talk about hockey while they keeping an eye on the games we couldn't see.
Again, I genuinely had a great night watching hockey last night. I really hope they bring back the frozen frenzy broadcast a few more times this year on busy days/nights (even if the starts on staggered). And even if they don't, I really hope that they build several nights like this into next year's schedule. I had my doubts about whether hockey could lend itself to a channel like this since it is so much more of a flow game with way less clear buildup to a scoring play than football is. That doubt was erased last night. I don't think it can ever be quite as perfect as RedZone is, but I think it can be a damn good product.
Finally, I don't think that we have to have all 32 teams playing to do a Frozen Frenzy broadcast. And I don't think we have to have starts every 15 minutes to do it. I think that you could do this kind of broadcast every Tuesday or Thursday where there are 10+ games. Tomorrow there are 5 games starting at 7, 2 games starting at 7:30 , 1 game at 8, and 2 games at 9 (all times Eastern). Convince just 1 of those 5 home teams starting at 7pm to delay their start by 15 minutes and suddenly you should have a 3 hour window with at least 1 game not at intermission. This could be a weekly broadcast (albeit not quite as well laid out as last night) on ESPN+.
