The National Hockey League trade deadline passed on Feb. 29 and what is supposed to be a day of fun for fans and broadcasters alike turned out to be a dud.
In the days leading up to the big day many teams were busy improving their rosters with a plethora of trades.
Most of the big names that were expected to be traded were either traded before the 29th deadline or were not traded at all. That left broadcasters with very little to do on their nine hour broadcast covering the day.
From the time the coverage started at seven o’clock, it took several hours for the first trade to come in and a few hours after that for the first meaningful trade to be consummated.
To pass the time one of the stations broadcasting coverage had a prime minister race where people dressed in inflatable prime minister suits ran around the studio jumping off one another and bouncing off the work desks placed throughout the studio.
After that fun was over and there was still nothing to report they pulled out a t-shirt cannon and had a retired goalie turned broadcaster shoot a t-shirt over 100km/h at the host of the sports highlight show just for some addition fun and laughs.
All in all there was a lot of goofing around and not a whole lot of actual action taking place.
Admittedly, had I been watching the coverage I probably would have been at least mildly amused by their antics but it was still a lot of wasted television time for not a lot of actual reporting.
As the day went on things did get much busier with many trades coming in right around the two o’clock deadline but the damage had been done.
Several hours of a whole lot of nothing followed by a couple of hours of steady trades.
While I admit it is pretty hard to fault the broadcaster for there not being a lot of trades coming in, it is easy to blame them for year after year of nine hour coverage for a show that consistently spends the first few hours killing time until the first trade comes in.
It’s not like they could argue that there would be a flurry of activity early in the day either, with all the pre-deadline trades they had to know that there was going to be a significantly reduced number of trades made on the day.
For future years, instead of making the talent work a nine hour day with very little to talk about trade wise, why not just go back to the way the show used to be and have it start closer to the deadline and cut out all the wasted air time early in the morning?
People still watch sure, but how long is it going to be before viewers see nothing but inflatable prime minister races and t-shirt cannons early in the morning and stop watching until later in the day?
