The Detroit Red Wings played the Nashville Predators at 7:30 EST tonight (11/7/07).
Anyone and everyone who has paid the $100+ for the NHL Center Ice package (which is supposed to broadcast every NHL regular season game) planned on watching the game.
Well, surprise surprise… the game was not listed on the Center Ice channel line-up (8 channels in all), and was never shown on Center Ice, even though many of the designated NHLCI channels had no games showing tonight due to the light schedule.

Come to find out, the Wings/Predators game was only being showed on the new, Gary Bettman wet dream NHL Network channel, which hardly anyone gets through their cable or satellite provider. Some dish subscribers have commented that they do receive the channel, but the majority of hockey fans do not. And if you do want the new NHL Network on a lot of cable systems, you have to pay even more as part of a sports package to be able to view it. To top it off, there were a lot of reports that the game wasn’t even being shown on the NHL Network due to “technical difficulties”.

Talk about screwing over and turning off your fans. Gary Bettman, what the heck is going on here? You make your fans pay for a service that guarantees them the ability to watch every regular season game, and then you create a new NHL Network which is another pay channel, and broadcast games on it, leaving fans on your original subscriber network in the dark.

How the hell are we supposed to watch hockey? Currently you have a two-night-per-week contract with Vs. (the network that no one gets or has heard of, but still requires a cable/satellite subscription if they want to see any games at all), NHL Center Ice (which costs at least $140), NHL Center Ice Online (which costs $169), NHL Network (which has a varied rate, and many people can’t even pay to get at this point), and then a pathetic contract with NBC (which shows one game a week during church hours only late in the season, and they don’t the NHL anything)…
and FANS STILL CAN’T WATCH A GAME that they’ve paid to see???!!! How is this helping hockey? Where is the logic? My only logic is that the NHL is hurting for money so bad that they have to try to use everyone third-world TV outlet possible to bring in revenue, because the league can’t be marketed to big name networks like ABC, ESPN, FOX, or any network that any hockey fan gets… because the NHL is in such rough shape due to Gary Bettman’s terrible (mis)management of the league. How do you expect to maintain and grow a fan base when you deny a hockey fan the ability to watch a game, even after they have paid hundreds of dollars to view the sport that they love??!

Who knows, maybe Gary Bettman is trying to let Nashville fade slowly from the public eye, before they are relocated to a place where there are hockey fans who will notice the game isn’t being shown on TV. Next time he should do it when the Predators are playing a team such as Phoenix, because this dim-witted move has Red Wings fans up in arms.