from Jonathan Willis of The Athletic,
It started off with the survey. For nearly a month, hockey writers across The Athletic shared the link and asked their readers to share their opinions on their local broadcast teams and the best and worst elsewhere. Thousands of you did, with all of you rating your local broadcast on a scale of very poor to very good, and many of you obligingly chiming in on teams from other markets.
Once the votes were in, the opinions of the fans and non-fans had to be balanced. Local fans are the intended audience of any regional broadcast and watch theirs far more regularly than out-of-towners. Out-of-market fans, on the other hand, tended to be far more objective and equally willing to call out good and bad....
23. Detroit Red Wings
The results: We’ve seen a few markets (Anaheim, Florida) where the locals like the product a lot more than national viewers do, but Detroit takes the cake. FSD’s Red Wings telecast ranks 16 spots higher on the local scale than the non-local scale. No other broadcast has a greater discrepancy between local love and out-of-market disdain.
That’s a good indication of a competent but biased broadcast and seems to be something of which even Red Wings fans who love it are aware.
“Ken Daniels’s play-by-play is excellent, and Mickey Redmond/Chris Osgood on colour is wonderful fan service,” said one Detroit fan who gave FSD the highest possible score.
“Ken Daniels is the best in the business,” said another local with a “very good” vote. “Mickey has learned to tame some of his homerism, but he does still struggle with it, and if they don’t turn it around soon, he might retire because I don’t know how much of this rebuild he can take.”
more ($$$) on the Wings plus all the other teams...
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