Bob Cole: "...and they're back in the series!" "I told you, don't count them out!"

I was watching game 3 on CBC because I like Bob Cole. Well, I used to like Bob Cole. But c'mon he was just talking trash yesterday. "THE SENS ARE BACK! I TOLD YOU SO! DON'T COUNT THEM OUT!"...

Are you kidding me?!

Sens still have a loooong way to go if they wanna be back in the series.

Yeah I know, Cole's Canadian and he's gonna support his team, but still, he just sounded stupid last night.

Ok, enough about Cole, let's talk about the game. Or the referees I should say. They sucked...big time. No, I'm not talking about the Alfredsson "kick", I'm talking about the penalties. I'm talking about Emery's dive and the penalty on Getzlaf late in the third period. I don't exactly have a problem with the penalty Getz got, it just bothers me that Sens should get 3 penalties in the 15 seconds leading to his penalty. Inconsistent officiating throughout the game and especially in the third period.

Maybe Garry "I'm destroying the NHL, but I'm just doing what's in the best interest of the team owners" Bettman had a meeting with the refs before the game and told them: "Look, Sens should win tonight, because our tv ratings are at an all-time low and we should somehow stretch this series to at least 6 games."

Next, the Pronger elbow. Should he be suspended?

First of all Pronger's 6'6" and that's why his elbows are gonna hit heads and necks all the time. I'm not saying it was a clean hit per se, he should have gotten a penalty, but it looked much more dramatic then it really was.

And I had enough of Heatley complaining over the refs. Maybe he should consider playing soccer? At least there he could whine about the refs all the time and he wouldn't stand out as much. Hockey isn't for pussies Danny.


After all is said and done Sens won game 3 and it doesn't matter if they deserved it or not. And may Bob Cole suffer a heart-attack from all the joy so we can have another announcer next time. Maybe I'll even consider switching to Versus.

Game 1 watched in just 523,000 U.S. households

Fact 1: Versus is available to 72 million homes.

Fact 2: The first game of the 2007 Stanley Cup finals on Versus was watched by 523.000 households.

Fact 3: The first game of the NBA eastern conference finals between the Pistons and the Cavs on ABC has been watched in 2,9 million households.

Fact 4: The NBA is panicking that the ratings are down from last year.

Fact 5: Garry Bettman will tell you that nothing's wrong with the NHL.

What does that tell you?


And again people in Canada will start complaining that Garry Bettman is an idiot and nobody in the U.S. cares about the NHL. Do you really think that a guy in Miami or Chicago is interested in the Stanley cup finals featuring a small market team like Anaheim and a bunch of angry dudes with no teeth from Canada? Of course not.

C'mon, California and Florida combined have 5 NHL teams, Canada just 6, and hockey is a religion in Canada. Bettman should finally realize that there's just no way that he's gonna make people in let's say Atlanta watch the NHL. People in Atlanta wanna watch the Falcons and maybe the Braves and that's it. Same goes for the Predators, Hurricanes and the Coyotes. There's just no way that an NHL team located in a small market, or a city where football rules (which is pretty much every city in the U.S. at this point). Would the league have worse ratings if the Predators were in Winnipeg? Quite frankly I don't know, all I know is that the league can't afford to lose any more viewers and maybe it's time to take a gamble and move some teams back to Canada. At least there the arenas will be full, even if the team isn't exactly a cup contender.

The fact is that the NHL isn't gonna get better ratings by pushing Crosby as the "next great one", they should just move some teams back to Canada where people care about hockey.