Seems like everything is either vanilla and boring (The Hockey Guy) or over the top clownish (SteveDangle). I listen to Locked On New York Rangers but the guy is kind of boring and while the Rangers guy is good enough I listened to his interview with the Panthers guy and he was terrible, could barely string a sentence together. Meanwhile the horrible New York Giants have some great podcasts where they breakdown film and have strong analysis. And these guys are usually fans that do these podcasts so the lack of resource argument doesn't seem to fly.
That’s the modern NHL for ya.
Serious answer - I suspect many who could be doing these sorts of hockey podcasts do NFL stuff because it’s vastly more profitable.
Hockey’s a very chaotic sport - you can endlessly nitpick football because they huddle up, decide what to do, have 25 more seconds to figure out what the defense is trying to do, then another 4-8 seconds of the play itself.
Plus all the coaching decisions that go into every play.
There are so many layers to a bad decision.
In hockey, it’s pretty obvious where the error is, and half the time it’s the result of a frozen bit of rubber taking a supernatural hop. End of discussion.
The coach in hockey either told the right guys to go get em or he didn’t, to a large extent.
Hockey is also a great “remember a guy” game - and that’s another problem. Hockey is a lot of fun to talk about, with other people. A lot of these YouTubers in particular are solo acts.
In particular with YouTube, you won’t start getting paid for your videos until you reach a thousand subscribers, and most creators will lose interest and stop doing it themselves long before they hit that milestone.
It’s hard to monologue about, especially if it isn’t your full time job.
If most of these podcasts don’t have multiple cast members involved, it’s going to be very hard to be compelling.
Which is another thing - it’s hard to be compelling. And interesting. And consistent. Especially when you have bills to pay.
When you consider even 95% of gainfully employed full time professionals don’t make much covering the NHL, you can see why so few noteworthy hockey channels exist.
