from Steve LePore of Puck The Media,

I caught Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole on very good days.

The Saturday afternoon that I spoke to Onrait came the day after he'd just taken his girlfriend to Disneyland, and the Monday I talked with O'Toole, he was staring at the Alberta rockies from a hotel before playing in a Hockey Alberta golf tournament with Onrait. Still, you get the sense that these two are about as Canadian as it gets (i.e. polite and generally jovial) most of the time. They just happen to be two of the funniest men on sports television.

If you're on Twitter, follow or talk to someone from Canada, or just know hockey fans familiar with their work (Onrait's dadaesque trade deadline show appearances for TSN always appear on the NHL Network in America), the buzz about Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole can seem a little bit like the promotional effort for Gabbo, the television puppet rival to Krusty the Klown in one episode of The Simpsons. Other than some YouTube best-ofs, they are almost complete unknowns to American television.

That really seems to be the only risk Fox has made in bringing them to Los Angeles, that they haven't had much experience with the audience they're speaking to. The other way you can look at it is that Fox Sports 1 has landed a sports highlight show with almost a decade of chemistry already set in. The show's still anonymous producer, Tim, has come along with them and the guys swear up and down that their part of the show, Fox Sports Live, will be more or less the same as their TSN SportsCentre.

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