There was more – much, much more – of this Jersey (Devil) Shore banter over three endless hours of watching the hosts prattle on while also trying to follow the game in a split screen on CBC.ca. (The hosts kept mangling the site ID). There was an on-set moderator who did her best to drum up Internet chatter about straddling strangers at a party while your significant other watched. Mercifully, she failed.

As a mortified on-set CBC producer watched in stunned disbelief, he might have wondered, as we did, what were the rehearsals like? Did no one in authority at what’s left of CBC Sports not recognize that the concept was unready and required, say, 20 years of rehearsal? That the women foisting themselves on the public are singularly unremarkable beyond their gender and devoid of wit? That maybe polluting the entire CBC network in a PR blitz last week impugns the reputations of people with real integrity and talent?

Put another way, would CBC promote, program and perpetuate Andrew Dice Clay or Denis Leary lampooning Coronation Street and its fans with a sewer stream of sexual innuendo and putdowns? Of course not. But it’s okay to rip male hockey fans. This car-crash concept is what a hockey program looks to programmers who condescend to the sport, who loathe the millions who watch the sport regularly – but who are always happy to cash the cheques it brings in.

Continued with Blue Jays talk…

And the * is there for a reason: I’ve watched the vast majority of my Red Wings games since 1999 while chatting with an almost all-female slate of pals on a tiny, anonymous little hockey bulletin board, and they are, as a rule, more knowledgeable about the sport than the vast majority of my male hockey friends. Sure, they like the eye candy, too, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, but while I understand that the CBC’s trying to reach out to, let’s say a “certain demographic”...

Most of the female hockey fans I know would be insulted by being talked down to or being told by a network that they can’t possibly enjoy hockey unless it’s dumbed down and sexed up to the point that the CBC of all networks might be suggesting that hockey’s only interesting to women if you turn it into puckbunny theatre (is this Doctor Pepper 10, “It’s not for women!” advertising philosophy at work here?).

That’s like the NHL’s still brilliant attempts to sell those awful pink-and-white jerseys that have poorly silkscreened logos when what they really want is a jersey that doesn’t fit like a potato sack and doesn’t fall apart after the second time they wash it…

And maybe the CBC might want to spend more time and money marketing hockey to women while accepting that females understand that “backside pressure,” “gap control,” “1-2-2” and “1-3-1 formations” and even “forechecking” are anything but terms related to sexual innuendo.

Morons.