I have a love/hate relationship with Hockey Night in Canada. I love Ron MacLean and his terrible-yet-clever puns. I love the cheesy and dramatic game intros. I also find the CBC’s camerawork noticeably better than that of the other networks which cover hockey, including TSN. I even like Don Cherry … most of the time. Where else can I see a man dressed in a suit made from old curtains every week? But the best thing about Hockey Night in Canada is that it’s just always there. It’s a tradition. A constant in Canadian broadcasting. You know it’s on, and I know it’s on, and everyone else knows it’s on, and many of us are watching it.

In a way it’s been around too long, and it’s firmly entrenched in a very deep rut. Much like the Toronto Maple Leafs, HNIC’s favourite cash cow, the show has an assured audience of suckers hockey fans who will keep on watching no matter what, and so it has nothing to give it the kick in the pants it needs to move forward onto fresh ground. This leads to many of the things I hate about the show: continued wall-to-wall coverage of the aforementioned detestable hockey team; continued employment of commentators who are either idiotic (hi, Harry Neale and Greg Millen) or simply past their prime (sorry, Bob Cole — you are a great play-by-play man, but it’s time to retire); and a continued bias towards the past, which shows itself in a particularly objectionable way in the elevation of “veteran leaders” (read: over the hill players, mostly Canadians, whose glory days happened back when Sidney Crosby’s father was in diapers) like Gary Roberts to near godlike status while players who are living their glory days right now, like Henrik Zetterberg, are relegated to the background. Don Cherry was far from alone in heaping an absolutely ridiculous amount of worship — there is no other word for what was going on — on Roberts during the 2008 playoffs, but he was certainly one of the most egregious offenders, going so far as to say that anyone who failed to kneel at the altar of Gary was a “dummy” who didn’t understand hockey and should be watching golf.

You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t quite accept this. I do get that Roberts probably played a very important role in terms of leadership off the ice for the Penguins, but the fact remains that the man didn’t play in almost half the team’s playoff games and could not by any stretch of the imagination have been considered a major story in the Final. The CBC commentators drooled over him so much that I actually felt embarrassed for them. But I digress.

The point is that there are many things I would change about Hockey Night in Canada. (I would start by making them show more Sens games on the west coast, but I accept that that is my personal bias.) One thing I would not ever, in a million billion kazillion years, have changed is the damn theme music! Come on! It’s iconic! Even when the Leafs are on (as usual, and they’re probably losing) and I have to watch the Sens on the tiny little video stream on my computer (which hurts my back because I have to sit in my desk chair, not that the CBC cares), I still turn on the TV just to see the intro and the theme. Saturday night hockey is not Saturday night hockey without that music. You want to go in a “new direction,” CBC? How about you deal with some of the issues I pointed out above and leave the bloody music alone? Trust me, your themesong is the last thing holding you back.

The story of what happened here, which starts with a lawsuit and ends with CTV buying the rights to the song in perpetuity and using it for hockey coverage on its affiliated network, TSN, is so disturbing to me on so many levels that I hardly know where to begin. I’m not an expert, but it seems as though the CBC was, as the composer’s lawsuit contends, acting outside its license agreement in it use of the song, which I think speaks to very poor management. If the CBC loses this suit, the settlement will cost quite a bit of money, presumably taxpayer money, and probably the same amount of money it would have cost us just to buy the song outright, except now we’ll get no benefit from it. Well played! I know people would have been up in arms over spending so much public money on the song, but as someone who is training to be an archivist and who believes that the government has an important role to play in preserving culture and heritage, I feel it would have been a good investment.

I’m also a believer in the importance of a public broadcaster for Canada; I’m therefore alarmed that the CBC is having such difficulty competing with CTV, which was able to outbid it not only for “The Hockey Theme,” as I understand it’s now being called, but also for the rights to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Additionally, CTV recently purchased the rights to the Anne of Green Gables TV movies and Road to Avonlea. All these little pieces of Canadiana moving into the hands of a corporation which has absolutely no responsibility to anything but its bottom line … call me crazy, but it makes me a little uncomfortable.

Aside from that, I think losing its theme music is symbolic of a larger decline for Hockey Night in Canada, a subject we’ve been discussing at the SensNation forum. As has been pointed out at Five For Smiting, the song was a very important part of Hockey Night in Canada’s “brand” identity. We’ve all read No Logo, or at least some of us have read the first two chapters, so we know how important branding is these days. Hockey Night in Canada is (or was) basically the Coke of hockey in terms of brand identity: everyone recognizes it, and everyone knows what it means. Far from being “a constant commercial” for the CBC, use of the song during hockey coverage on TSN will in fact likely lessen the impact of the Hockey Night in Canada brand name. It’s like if Pepsi started selling itself in those old style glass bottles. You see the bottle, and you assume you’re getting Coke. Chances are you might not even look at the label. You drink the contents, and hey, it’s not Coke! But it’s not bad. Oh, it’s Pepsi! Well, maybe next time you’re in the store you’ll get Pepsi instead. And it’s all downhill from there for Coke.

I’m not saying that no song = immediate and total loss of audience, but it seems as though a reduced brand recognition among viewers could eventually be harmful to Hockey Night in Canada’s status as a premiere source of hockey coverage. When you combine this with the recent announcement of TSN’s new deal with the NHL, which will see it broadcast 70 games during the season, all featuring at least one Canadian team, and possibly even a playoff series featuring a Canadian team — something which has to this point been solely CBC territory, the CBC is looking less and less like the place you want to go for Canadian hockey coverage. Considering that its whole function is supposed to be to provide coverage of Canadian NHL teams, that’s not a good thing.

And the fact is that CBC just doesn’t need any more competition: its audience is already slipping gradually away. While NBC and Vs. in the US saw their ratings go up in the 2008 playoffs, it was reported that many Montreal fans, even anglophones, turned to French-language broadcaster RDS for the Habs games because they didn’t like CBC’s coverage of their team. Additionally, while the ratings for the Detroit-Pittsburgh Stanley Cup Final Series were up in the US, this year’s final was less-watched than last year’s on the CBC.

If, heaven forbid, Hockey Night in Canada should fail, the consequences for the CBC could be disastrous. We’ve already had a small taste of what can happen over there just because the Leafs miss the playoffs (again). Take away hockey entirely and the financial picture seems extremely bleak. Pretty soon they won’t have a budget to produce any new shows at all. Then CTV will hire Peter Mansbridge to replace Lloyd Robertson when he retires. When Rick Mercer inevitably bolts to the Comedy Network, they’ll be left with nothing to show but six month old episodes of Coronation Street and The Hour and, as much as I love George Stroumboulopoulos, one man does not a TV network make. Soon enough, the network will fold, and all we’ll have left to remind us of a once great tradition of public broadcasting is the Tickle Trunk.

Unless they’ve sold that too.

Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba got the Sens/Coyotes game on TV today. BC got the Leafs! Apparently they were going to show the Sens but then last night decided to go with the Leafs because they are making this late run at the playoffs. But for some reason every other western province still got the Sens, even though the Canucks are the only western team likely to be affected by the Coyotes.

AAAAAAAAARGH.

Why me? Seriously. Why does the CBC hate me?

But:

I … what just happened? I feel so confused.

The heat is back on: two goals, one assist for the Heater in his most triumphant return! Even better, the Sens actually won the game 5-4. It wasn’t a brilliant performance by the team overall, but a win is a win right now.

Today being Hockey Day in Canada, normally all six Canadian NHL teams would play other Canadian NHL teams and the CBC would show all three games; however, because the Northeast and Northwest divisions do not meet each other this season and none of the Flames, Oilers, and Canucks plays the Sens, Leafs, or Habs even once this season, that can’t happen. Instead we got Detroit playing Toronto for the early game, Vancouver playing Colorado in the late game, and for some reason the only two all-Canadian matchups of the day — Edmonton vs. Calgary and Ottawa vs. Montreal — were at the exact same time. Thanks, NHL.

This was unfortunate scheduling, especially for me because CBC of course opted to show Calgary and Edmonton in the Vancouver region and I had to watch the online stream of the Sens game on my computer. Still, I was feeling good before the game because Alfie came back today and the big three were at last reunited! This realignment of the stars had disastrous consequences for the Habs: Spezza scored two goals in the first two minutes and then Alfie got another. With the Sens up 3-0 with only 6 minutes gone in the first, I was praying to the hockey gods that they could hold the lead.

They did, and even better, they added to it. Final score: Ottawa 6, Montreal 1. Spezza: 3 goals, 3 assists (moves up to 4th in the league in scoring). Alfredsson: 2 goals, 3 assists (13 points in his last 3 games, and after tonight he is now back to being tied for the league scoring lead). Heatley: 1 goal, 3 assists (7 points in 2 games since returning from injury). Big line total: 15 points. Emery: 33 saves, in what I think must have been one of the best goaltending performances for the team all season. If he can keep it up, I’ll be able to stop hating the goalies and demanding that they both be traded for a bag of pucks.

The team was also a bit lucky in that Montreal had about 4 or 5 shots go off the goalposts, but I tend to think puck luck is a good sign and might mean things are going to turn around now. I hope so anyway. For now, the Sens are back on my good side. I can put a hold on my fan breakdown, stop staring at that bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and regain my normal sunny disposition.

But back to the big line. They’re just so ridiculously good when they’re on, those three, clicking, like they were born to play together. And not one of them has a contract that expires before 2012. Score! Amusing fact: Spezza had a total of 13:37 minutes of icetime. He is truly an elite player. Hahahahaha … ahem. This was his first ever hat trick, and he was extremely happy about it. I saw him in post-game interviews and he was absolutely beaming.