The NHL expansion draft, which took place on Wednesday, July 21, was televised on ESPN, marking the first time that the “Worldwide Sports Leader” aired NHL content. This coming season, ESPN will begin covering actual NHL games, including the postseason and four of the next seven Stanley Cup Finals.
As a new team in the league, the Seattle Kraken are allowed to build their roster by selecting one unprotected player from 30 of the 31 other NHL teams. The Vegas Golden Knights were the only team not required to cede a player to the Expansion Draft, as their owner, Bill Foley, struck a deal with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman which basically said that if there were to be a new NHL team within the first five years of Las Vegas’ joining the league, that they would not have to give a player to them. It just so happened that next year will be the Golden Knights’ fifth year in the league, exempting them from the draft, as per this agreement.
Bettman started things off on the wrong foot by referring to the Kraken’s arena as “Climate Change Arena” in his opening address to the audience, both televised and in-person. . The actual name of the building is “Climate Pledge Arena”. Things just went downhill from there.
The two ESPN anchors for the event were Dominic Moore, a former Bruin and Chris Fowler. Neither seemed to know what they were doing, in particular, Fowler. His first faux-pas of the evening was referring to the Florida Panthers as the “Carolina Panthers”. Um, that’s an NFL team, Chris. Do you actually get paid for this kind of ignorance? Next, Fowler claimed that “whoever gets selected from the Sabres should be the happiest guy this afternoon.” I’m guessing that Fowler was attempting to be ‘edgy’ with this comment but in my opinion it was a classless swipe at a long-suffering organization. The Buffalo, NY team, which joined the league in 1970, has sadly never hoisted the Stanley Cup. He followed-up this uncalled-for diss by saying that the Sabres “are the only team looking and thinking ahead to the entry draft” because that’s the only positive thing for them to look at amid “their countless problems”. I have two comments: “Ouch” and “Why??”
Fowler went on to add another victim to his ‘burn’ list by sharing his belief that the Toronto Maple Leafs’ championship drought “won’t end anytime soon”. Later on in the broadcast, he trolled the Leafs a second time, saying that their 2020/21 campaign was “a strong regular season kind of forgotten, as they blew the 3-1 lead to Montreal. They have the longest Stanley Cup drought in NHL history. It’s going to be about 20,000 days”. Fowler finished up a stellar night of broadcasting by referring to the New Jersey Devils as an “NYC team”. Crack an atlas much, Chris? Don’t sound like ya do.
Now, where would we be if we didn’t talk about Kraken GM Ron Francis? He looked like he’d rather be in a North Korean labor camp than at the expansion draft. Surrounded by thousands of fans, one would think that he would have wanted to match their enthusiasm for the newly christened Kraken. However, he sounded lifeless and miserable announcing the names of the players he had selected. I thought this was supposed to be an exciting event, but maybe Francis sounded the way he did because the entire Kraken roster had been leaked six hours before the event by a couple of shady “insiders” who thought that ruining the anticipation shared by an entire city was a good idea. What the problem is with these jerks is a topic for another day. Regardless, the bottom line is, Francis showed no enthusiasm for the draft, whatsoever.
Let’s move on to the head-scratching choices that the network made regarding the structure and presentation of the draft. For starters, half of the draft pick announcements were pre-recorded. Most of them got pulled out of a fish (gross) or a notebook that’s apparently “unique” to the city of Seattle. So pathetic. Why was this particular type of notebook ‘unique’ to Seattle? No clue. They didn’t ever say.
Many of the draftees were announced from the Space Needle, Mount Rainier, and the Seattle Aquarium. Sounds cool, right? It wasn’t. First of all, all of the location footage was pre-recorded. Secondly, the Seattle sports stars and celebrities who participated didn’t even announce the names themselves. Instead, they just asked the question, “Mr. Francis, who do you select from (insert NHL team name here)?” The camera would then cut to the miserable Mr. Francis, live on stage, who would then reveal the name of the player with all the enthusiasm of a kid on his way to the dentist’s office. My guess is that the motivation behind this stunt was to promote tourism to Seattle but someone should have notified ol’ Ronnie Boy, cause he looked like he was on his way to the electric chair.
It can be argued that this is only the first hockey related event ESPN has covered in over 15 years and that they’ll make improvements as needed, going forward. However, even though ESPN is arguably the #1 sports channel on cable and online, the network has a long history of disrespecting the sport of hockey. The most notable instance of this is when Max Kellerman, a widely known sports analyst, claimed that “no one cares about hockey and it is not one of the four major sports”. If Kellerman is talking about South American Central America, Europe, or Asia, I would have to agree but sorry, in the United States, the NHL is more popular than any single soccer league. Television viewership statistics back me up on this. However, I have to wonder whether Kellerman said this because at the time, ESPN wasn’t covering hockey. Many hockey supporters have been posting online that watching Kellerman and the rest of the ESPN crew fumble their way through hockey coverage will be a “disaster”.
Before this new partnership with the NHL, the only sports featured across the top ESPN’s homepage were the NFL, MLB, the NBA, and Soccer, while the NHL was buried in the “other” column along with NASCAR, tennis, rugby, golf, MMA, the WNBA, horse racing and other second- and third-tier sports. C’mon… horse racing? Can we at least keep it to HUMAN sports??! If anything, the poor coverage of the Kraken expansion draft only strengthened the argument that ESPN doesn’t care about hockey. This makes me wonder why ESPN even wanted the rights to televise NHL games and events in the first place.
