Shame on the NHL for starting their playoff games at a decent hour...don't they know that, on good days, I don't get home from work until after the game has already started, then sit down to a nice dinner with my family that ends with the little one shouting "uh oh" as he turns his food dish upside down on the floor and the middle one singing "Bringing in the Sheaves" at the top of his lungs (that actually happened) followed by three baths, an untold number of stories, a bottle, two bowls of cereal, then the start of bedtime preparations?
Ah, but that's why they invented TiVo. TiVo, quickly becoming the world's greatest generic eponym since Kleenex, Jell-o, and the Davenport, allows you to do essentially the same thing that VCR's did 35 years ago, (tape stuff on TV) except now it actually works. You can tape the whole game and watch it on your own time. Couldn't think of anything else I'd change...ok, one thing.
NHL, you could stand to add more TV timeouts. Yeah I said that. More TV timeouts. You need to be more like the NFL, where each team gets 35 challenges per half, plus five media timeouts per quarter, which often creates the dreaded field goal-commercial-touchback-commercial-challenge-commercial sequence where you can go milk a cow and not miss a single play.
We TiVoers love football for those long stretches of no action...running the Fast Forward thing up to 4, refusing to slow down for that Discover Card commercial where the two African-American ladies amuse each other (they are the same lady though, right?) for your son who has the whole commercial memorized, down to the cackling, then slamming on the TiVo breaks to see that the coach in fact can't challenge the kickoff.
Not so in hockey. By my count you get 4 media timeouts per period, each lasting a paltry minute, plus two 10-12 minute intermissions that the 4-speed on the TiVo blasts through so fast you don't even see Mike Milbury (not so bad...) You make up no ground whatsoever, unless you fast forward through all the Penguins goals against; which is where you can make up some time.
Tonight, by the time the Penguins got through s__tting the ice on Long Island, the BlackHawks/Wild game was in the first intermission, and everyone who had attempted to stay up to watch the game with me was asleep. NHL, by keeping your regulation games to a tidy, efficient 2-and-a-half hours, with limited sideshow interruptions, you are losing millions of tiny Tivo fans who simply can't stay awake long enough to get caught up. Please consider this the number one agenda item at your Summer Meetings, if you have them...longer games.
Confession: I don't have Tivo...just a "DVR." And I use "tissues" to smear "petroleum jelly" on my baby's butt.
No comments:
Post a Comment