Stanley Cup Switch-Off

Here’s a suggestion for all Detroit Red Wings fans ahead of Thursday’s Game Four in the Stanley Cup Finals: Don’t watch. At all.

Turn off the TV, do some housework, take the dog for a walk or chat to the neighbors. But leave the viewing to those in Pennsylvania and the suits of the NHL.

I’m serious. As much as it seems like fan lunacy (as in, real fans support their team, come what may), it makes perfect sense.

First, it will send a message to the blinkered buffoons at league HQ that you can’t put a marquee event on a cable station most people have never heard of and maintain any kind of credibility.

The playoffs on Versus is like putting the Super Bowl on Comedy Central. It’s a joke of the unfunniest kind, pure and simple.

If the (already paltry) viewing figures for Game Three are followed up with a near-zero rating for Game Four, the NHL just might realise its standing with the fans, with the people who truly care about the sport, is dropping like a stone.

Second, it will raise a measurable protest at the way these playoffs have been (mis)handled almost from start to finish. Putting out officials who miss call after call (go back and review the Anaheim and Chicago series if you have any doubts) and then scheduling the first three games of the Finals in four days is the kind of slap-in-the-face arrogance that only the immensely successful or terminally dumb can pull off.

And third and most important, it will prevent Wings fans from the kind of angst and anguish they had to suffer on Tuesday night witnessing yet another display of officiating incompetence that absolutely cost them the game (see also Game Two against the Ducks and Game Three against the Blackhawks).

It certainly raises the question of how desperate the NHL must be to ensure their precious series survives to Saturday night and a second chance to breathe the much-needed air of exposure into the Finals on NBC (even if the network still insist on covering the event as if the only two players involved are called Malkin and Crosby).

It’s hard to suggest there was anything deliberate about a schedule that clearly penalizes the defending champs; about a league disciplinary process that waives its own procedure when it might have to suspend a star player (who just happens to be called either Malkin or Crosby); and about officials who refuse to recognize when one team has an extra man on the ice for half a minute (perhaps they were waiting for a seven, or even eight-man front?).

But fans can certainly be excused for detecting the nasty odour of suspicion about the way events are unfolding, most especially about how the only four people in the Mellon Arena who didn’t notice the Penguins’ six-man assault were the ones with the whistles.

So, the only way for Wings fans to make their feelings known at 8pm on Thursday is to leave the TV set blank, switched off, somnolent. You know it makes sense.