Ye the standard of hockey in afternoon games is usually lower, but that usually provides equal entertainment

Why don't the Leafs play afternoon games?

and while on the subject, it always seems like the Flyers have the afternoon slot every weekend, wtf is that about?

I was going to look for a radio or a signal processor with a delay so that I could listen to the radio broadcast.

But I'm doing this now:

Listening to the game on the iPad [it is delayed about 30 seconds] and on my PVR (like a TiVo) I can "pause live TV" and delay it to match the iPad.

The sound quality is just ok, it cuts out sometimes and you have to stop the stream and restart it.

It's a bit tricky to get the sound to line-up because there is a bit of a pause after you press <Play> on the PVR. I try to get it done during the anthems.

There are lots of places to drink before a Jets game. Afternoon seems to be the Jets' slot on HNIC. It kinda ruins things, but it's good for the kiddies.

Pretty sure it's directly correalated to the markets in the US. I think teams like Pittsburgh, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Boston play far more games in the afternoon than any of the Canadian teams or teams in the sunbelt/smaller markets.

lol 72o, welcome to 2 weeks ago

pretty standard trying to grab the afternoon weekend market. especially in the winter months.

i sorta oppose the NBC games only bc they start at 9am PST or whatever

sometimes i'm not even up yet, lol

LOLswitch

The Leafs don't play afternoon games because the value of their Saturday night 7pm primetime Hockey Night in Canada spot is too high. They average like 2.2-3.2M viewers on Saturday night in Canada. That's the equivalent of an American program averaging 22-32M viewers, which I believe would be the #1 show in pretty much any time slot.

There was some recent nonsense about the Leafs corporate heads complaining about the schedule, and then the NHL responded with "well you choose to play every Saturday night" and the Leafs were like "umm no, YOU put us every Saturday night." Of course, it's more than that. Leafs on Saturday night Hockey Night in Canada is a 60+ year tradition. This is FAR beyond anything in NFL, NBA, etc. Leafs on Saturday night is as much Canadian culture as Tim Horton's, cottage country or Stompin' Tom.

If you scheduled the Leafs for an afternoon, whether it be Sunday or Saturday, then they couldn't make the Saturday 7pm slot, and HNIC's ratings would suffer.

The afternoon games in America are usually on NBC or NBC sports. They obviously are trying to get ratings, so they pick the most popular American teams to showcase. This is why Pittsburgh, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, New York, and lately Los Angeles have been featured in these games. Afternoon games truly are nothing more than corporate decisions by entertainment companies in an effort to gain viewers. They go against everything professional hockey has been for the past 70 years. They're simply NBC doing it because they can.

You don't ever see like, Columbus, NY Islanders, Florida, etc, in afternoon games, because NBC wouldn't force those teams to have afternoon games scheduled. No one cares enough to get the ratings.

Speaking of which, does anyone have ratings numbers for NBC afternoon broadcasts? It seems insane to me that they even bother. Like, I'm under the impression that they're getting max 2 million viewers for these games, and would be far better off broadcasting pretty much anything else... high school basketball, world championship fringe sport qualifying, I don't know. If my number estimates are right, it just seems like broadcasting hockey in the USA will always be at a loss.

The kings are good, we need this game...

Also I loled at "free mason" fwiw.

Ya, living in the Mountain time zone, I can sympathize with you on that. This morning for example was after a heavy night of drinking and I wasn't up until 1 PM EST.

To make one final point on the subject, this has always been my go-to rationalization on gameday posting. We're not trying to parse literature here, we're trying to have a few beers with our buddies and yell at the other team when they stink. I won't argue it can't be done better, but I will argue against a strict ban suddenly. I'd propose we all make a better effort to remove the "LOL X" and one-liner type posts when there is no hockey being played; I have admittedly done this more and more this year and will revert back to the form that made this thread the best in SE. However, from the time the first puck of the day drops until the final horn sounds, we should be able to heckle the Dumpster Flyers as if we were at the game* with 19,000 of our closest compatriots**.

*E.g.:

Post of the night:



You've got the needle swaying from the failure of the Flyers early on to the intense middle of the game and my thorough hatred of Pittsburgh taking over to the ridiculous result of:



If you don't want this to distract from the thread as a whole, then gameday threads are probably the way to go. However, I feel TTI's post is completely applicable in this context. Stuff like this is inherently part of being a sports fan.

**Example notwithstanding for Islanders fans.

Ban sea weiss for that post though.

We have to be consistent.

Can we please have one more night with low content posting? Why would you have to do this on the night of B's/Habs, Henrik?

High content poast:

Habs need to win this game if Plekanec is playing and Bergeron isn't or else I'll get banned for LOLing at them.

that was a cool factoid: Jaromir Jagr was drafted in 1990, 3 of his current Bruin teammates weren't even born yet, lol

because a blogger demanded it be done, damnit!

sea weiss: imo there's a difference between LC/NC posting on a random night when there are 6-8 games happening or whatever, and when there's one featured game (playoffs?) that we're all watching. in the latter scenario we all get the context, it makes sense. people "loling @ [x]" in randon regular season game has to go imo. maybe we can talk in the playoffs.

(threads for each series will obv help there, then you can GD it up to your heart's content if said series has their own thread, in one's without i might require ppl to explain exactly wtf it is they're talking about)

WHOOOOO!!!!! Kings won, they leapfroged Sharks again, now I need the Sharks to lose again and Canucks to lose today to feel a little more comfortable (Oh wait, I always want those two teams to lose in any circumstances.)

Also, on the subjects of afternoon games, I don't mind them that much. More often than not, these afternoon games bring such good entertainment quality. I just don't like Kings playing them that much since they don't run as well as a game played around 7:30 or so (with the exception of today).

You can't have a triple header without afternoon games!!

Saturday GDT could definitely be used.

+1

and no offense to anyone, but two of the post leaders this year are Holdem & Kirby. neither are exactly known for the content of their posts. i enjoy both of them a lot of the time, i remember when Holdem first became a reg here i thought he was very funny. Kirby makes me laugh all the time. i assume they're capable of more (Holdem especially, english bias ldo), but they don't. why? idk. but whatever, people can do as they please. it's like Rat too, sometimes he makes really good posts, but most times he chooses not to. ok, whatever. but imo the general threading BSing "lol [x]" is super weaksauce and lame, not worth posting or reading.

i think this opinion is something of a quiet majority (i really have no idea bc basically nobody ever PM's me to complain / discuss / whatever), given for example Holdem losing in round 1 of the POTY tournament this year. people just passive-aggressively voted against him and for a ~rand poster as a show of protest. did he get the memo? does he care? does anyone?

for now i feel like wasting my time and energy to see if i can make this a better place. if it's annoying, then idk ... blame Jared?

It's so depressing watching the oilers play the bigger teams on the road. We're drawing dead.

That's the problem with banning LC. You can't expect SE to be all high content. There are plenty, and I mean plenty of other forums you can go to with absolutely no low content stuff at all. SE is great because it's one of the very few forums that you can go to, and "lol x", "lol refs" "player x is terrible", etc.

What other forum would you go to that you'd get a poster (dkgo) posting IQ charts after an NFL game?

The LC stuff is highly entertaining and can lead to some amazing posts and meltdowns.


No offense to Geddy because he's obviously one of the most respected posters, but talking about his life situations are no content at all. I wouldn't want them to be removed from the thread, but you can't allow that and not allow "lol x" during games.

Go Leafs.
Go Lightening.
Go Canes.

i'm not expecting high content all the time, Gus. i'm expecting ppl to meet a minimum requirement of content with their posts. if that is not reached and you really and truly have nothing of substance to say, then hit back instead of post.

... Well played 72off... Well played...