Maple Leafs Fans Deserve Better Than Remote Broadcasts

Here we go again. Another misguided and uninformed decision is being made on the fate of a radio broadcast. This time it’s not just a regular season game. Oh no, this time it affects the broadcast of a Stanley Cup Playoff Series between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Tampa Bay Lightning. Seriously. Three-years post-pandemic, this is not a joke, but what a friggin’ joke!

Canada has been slow in getting back to normal when it comes to the media and travel. Toronto has been affected now a second time. It was understandable when travel was restricted due to COVID-19, but now, there’s no excuse.  Unfortunately for Toronto Maple Leafs’ fans, the middle games of their upcoming series with Tampa Bay will be broadcast remotely. Your announcers Joe Bowen and Jim Ralph will be stuck in a studio in Toronto calling what could be critical games for the Leafs in Florida. 

TSN and Sportsnet care so little about the fans in Toronto that they’ve pulled the same “stuff” with the Blue Jays. Team broadcaster Ben Wagner stays at home when the team is on the road. You never know what might go wrong. A broadcast from the Sportsnet studio was interrupted when the fire alarm was going off while the game was going on. If Wagner was in St. Louis, you don’t hear it, but he wasn’t, so it was loud and clear.  

Why does this continue to happen in Canada? Money. It’s pretty simple. 

These broadcast entities feel like they are saving a ton of money and still giving the audience what it comes to expect every night, a quality broadcast. In reality it’s been estimated that sending Bowen and Ralph to Tampa for this series would cost around $10,000. Not prohibitive enough to convince me or anyone else that the ‘savings’ are worth risking a broadcast that’s not up to standards.

This is the absolute wrong approach. Bowen and Ralph are probably used to it though. They were once again ‘grounded’ during the regular season, calling road games from home. But this is the playoffs for goodness sakes – the NHL playoffs, where the oldest trophy in sports is up for grabs. Where games can last 6 hours, thanks to sudden death overtime. A broadcaster really needs to be on his/her game. Buildings in the NHL can literally shake during the intensity of a playoff series, as fans get whipped up into a frenzy. You can feel the emotion through the broadcasts on radio. But not if you aren’t there. 

Then there’s the possibility of your team clinching the Stanley Cup on the road. How can you as a broadcaster possibly be expected to replicate the feeling of a team winning a championship from a studio miles and miles away? 

“After 40 years of doing Toronto Maple Leaf hockey games, if they finally get to the big prize, it’s going to be very disappointing if we’re stuck in a studio back at home when the trophy is paraded out,” Bowen said in an interview with the Athletic before last year’s playoffs. “But we will do the best that we can under the circumstances.”

That’s a healthy attitude to have going into the postseason. It isn’t a fair fight for broadcasters that are now relying on many outside factors, to do a job that they can perform much easier from the actual game. I know there are some of you out there saying, “why is he whining about this? Does it really matter?”

Why don’t you ask me that question when the broadcaster’s only feed from the game is suddenly interrupted? Now you aren’t even able to hear the game, because the feed is the announcer’s eyes and ears. It’s happened before and undoubtedly will happen again. Talk to me when the audio feed is ahead of the video, and you’re listening to the game and hear the goal horn going off a full 10 seconds before a goal is called on air. Annoying. 

Hockey is hard enough to call when you’re in the arena. Add this extra layer of minutia and it challenges even the seasoned play-by-play announcer and analyst. 

The television feed is restricting. It doesn’t show you what’s taking place away from the puck. Analysts want to see what’s happening between the blue lines. Troy Murray, the veteran analyst on Blackhawks radio, taught me that in 2014. He said something to the effect, “games can be won and lost by the action going on at center ice, away from the puck.” You won’t get that level of commentary because, you can’t see it. 

Now in some cases, like it was when I was calling White Sox games during the pandemic, we had a monitor that just had the game, and a separate monitor with several different ‘tiles’ that showed us the whole field, the bullpens and the scoreboard. These monitors were helpful at times, but the little squares of video were sometimes hard to see. 

Hockey features line changes, where players will just hop over the boards to replace someone on the ice. Play-by-play announcers can’t view them in the flow of the action, because in the split second they happen, you can’t divert your attention to seeing a change, without losing sight of the puck. Nothing seems to flow like it does when you are actually there, witnessing everything with your own eyes. 

When it was absolutely necessary to be away, I watched John Wiedeman and Troy Murray operate from a conference room at WGN Radio. There were two giant screens on the walls, with some other littler screens in front of each of them, with stats. The broadcasters were separated by a ‘cubicle divider’, so they couldn’t really play off the non-verbal cues they were so used to seeing. The Blackhawks were in the playoffs in the bubble. As hard as everyone tried, the signal and feed from Edmonton was not great. Yet both made the absolute best of it with the help of our talented engineering staff. 

The room featured a Blackhawks flag, and that was the only thing displayed that made it feel like a real broadcast booth.  It was hard to imagine how the two generated as much energy as they did in such a non-descript room. You couldn’t feel the emotion, or get caught up in the nuances and rhythm of the sport like normal. 

Again, this was during a time where travel was restricted and for a good reason. Nothing could be done, other than making the best of a less than ideal situation. 

Fast forward to this year. More specifically to the Maple Leafs’ situation. The broadcasters will be facing all of the challenges I mentioned before, but this situation is avoidable. Completely. Fan bases across the league can never get enough coverage of their team during this time of year. Add to the fact that this is an Original Six franchise and one that hasn’t won a playoff series in almost 20 years. 

Honestly, I feel strongly about this because I know how difficult it is from a broadcast standpoint to pull this off. There is no replacing actually being there, on site and on scene. Truthfully, there are many fans that never know the difference. They can’t tell if the broadcast is coming from Tampa or Toronto or some point in between. That’s mainly due to the professionalism of the broadcast teams. 

The scary part for the industry is that some believe this to be a ‘new normal’, something they can defer to whenever it fits their narrative. In reality it’s a selfish view that shortchanges the broadcasters and the fans. You’d think that would matter.