Things have been pretty dead here (can you tell?) but I expect they'll pick back up. It seems I've contracted something. Something unrelated to whatever it is that held me to half a voice all day today. Olympic fever.

First off, breaking news: NBC sucks. Here's a short recap of why:

• My cable service, which we'll call ACE Communications, because that's what it is, shows me that the Olympics are on USA, CNBC, and MSNBC in addition to NBC. It says so right in the guide. What reasons would the guide have to lie?
• Desperate for international hockey, I turn on the first women's game on the second day of the Games, and I'm instead "treated" to a movie called Eight Below, which has more dogs in it than people. I figure this is the fine work of ACE, who average about one repair trip per month our to my apartment to fix frequent outages.
• This happens every time I try to watch any Olympics on NBC owned stations (still get them on NBC though), so I work up some anger and call ACE.
• A person who's been trained to read lines of a sheet of paper tells me that NBC was asking for too much money so that's why they're not going to show the Olympics here. She tells me if I have a complaint I can leave a message with her manager, who is in a meeting.
• I leave a very curt message involving me asking for him to recommend me a better service and/or discount my bill, because if a cable company could decline paying for content then I was going to decline to pay for those channels. It made sense in my head.
• Manager doesn't return my call, I get the SAME woman who says the SAME thing, complete with the manager in a meeting bit.
• I leave an angrier message letting Mr. Manager know that I appreciated him ducking my calls.
• He finally calls me back, laying on the BS right away that he tried to call me back but I didn't answer or have voicemail, which is just untrue. This earned my trust.
• I'm furious with ACE, but the manager was actually honest with me. I only half-believe it because of the voicemail business, but here's the deal. To show the Olympics, NBC has cable companies on a certain contract. They don't pro-rate that contract, so they would have back billed ACE to January 2009, when the contract started. I'm not entirely sure how that stuff works, but it seemed honest and it seems feasible.
• When he told me that even though it would have cost him any profit for over a year, he's gotten enough complaints to where he regrets making that decision (and singled out being a hockey fan as why he regrets it) I chose to forgive him. Because I'm a great guy like that.
• Hence, my anger returned to NBC, aided by recent decisions to screw over Conan and bump hockey for ice dancing.

To make a long story short, don't live in the middle of nowhere. This story and many more will be available in the novel I plan to publish after I graduate, entitled "Why West Michigan Blows: A Tale of Uncivilized Beasts." Sorry, but it's true.

Needless to say, after this I wasn't too pumped about having to watch the Olympics via terrible online streams. I didn't expect I would watch much of it at all. I did find a way to get access to NBCOlympics.com which has actually been nice, but I missed almost all preliminary action dealing with this cable business.

Of all teams, it was Switzerland against Norway that got me jacked again for the Olympics. A hat trick by Tore Vikingstad (you can't make this up, folks) and a really strong game from "that guy Detroit might be interested in" Mats Zuccarello Aasen really set the stage for me. I even went back and watched a couple games through NBC's pretty neat-o archive feature. Now I'm completely hooked, despite NBC's best efforts to hold me down. I don't plan on missing a game for the rest of the tournament.

And part of that has to do with the States. What a game. I'd like to rip into NBC a little more, but their decision speaks for itself. They showed ice dancing. Meanwhile, one of the most entertaining games in Olympic history was going down on MSNBC, to near record ratings. An 8.2 rating. Compare that to MSNBC's 8.23 that they put up on election night. Americans don't care about hockey? Great call by the NBC executives. Ice dancing got great ratings, but there's no way that hockey game wouldn't have killed. That's all anyone was talking about today. Ryan Miller was even the top trending topic worldwide on Twitter last night. That means that more people in the world (on Twitter) were talking about that game than anything else. But yeah, ice dancing.

Meanwhile, Canada's been playing the blame game all day. Martin Brodeur has undone all the praise he earned in the past calendar year with all those wins and shutouts records. If you believe media and message board types, Brodeur is now past his prime, overrated, what have you, and clearly Roberto Luongo, who has never won anything of value, would have been able to win that game. Funny that Marc-Andre Fleury, a proven winner, doesn't come up. Others, like Joe Thornton and Scott Niedermayer are getting roasted for being players non-deserving of Olympic spots by fans and media people -- 98% of which had both players on the team heading into the tournament.

So the blame falls on Steve Yzerman and Mike Babcock, like I predicted it would if anything went wrong in Canada. Despite the fact that the US has two, maybe three players who would even make Canada, Yzerman has "officially" picked the wrong group. This group can't win. They barely beat Switzerland and they lost to the States. Even though they outplayed them for the entire game and the Americans only got by with some sensational goaltending and some great efforts from the grinders. The other thing that people are saying today is that this game is not a huge upset (I agree), because the US has great talent too. But where exactly was that talent last night? Patrick Kane was somewhat visible, but where were Zach Parise and Paul Stastny? This effort goes to the grinders.

Babcock's getting blasted for not just starting Brodeur, but not pulling him quickly enough. This is something that's gotta be hilarious to Red Wings fans as there are some parallels to the Chris Osgood situation. Without getting into that, I find it hilarious that all Brodeur's accolades and accomplishments only earned him to Brian Rafalski goals before the majority of Canada decided he should be on the bench. How do you, as a coach, make the decision to pull arguably the greatest goalie of all time after just two goals?

But this is Canada, this is what they do every international tournament. In my mind, they lost because of Brodeur's performance, but also because they were not getting to loose pucks and rebounds -- the Americans won too many battles in their own zone. You can play what ifs all day, but really, what difference would one or two roster changes have made? Your best players have to be your best players. Niedermayer sucked, Chris Pronger sucked and was benched in the 3rd, and Sidney Crosby was pretty invisible outside of his goal. Not terrible for sure -- but I watch Russia and I know that Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin are their best players. From watching that Canada game, I'd have to say Jonathan Toews, Drew Doughty, and Rick Nash were the best.

A great effort from the Americans though. Who is this sick looking bald guy and why is he so much better than the Brian Rafalski that's shown up in Detroit this season? Not just scoring clutch goals either -- this Rafalski is playing great hockey in his own zone and is logging crucial minutes when the game is on the line. Hopefully it leads to something more after the break. Ryan Kesler, always a guy I've liked despite hating the Canucks, scored by far the best empty net goal I'll ever see. Off of Corey Perry. Couldn't have been any better.

It's a Millericle.

Four games on tap tomorrow, four games that I intend on watching. Can't wait.

Comments (13)

NOHS Drew said:

	... So the title should be "Blame, Canada." And Mats Z.A. was totally on my NHL 09 Red Wings team after a couple seasons...no joke. I thought he was just one of those EA made-up people until I saw him in the US-Norway game last week.
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February 23, 2010 | url
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RFS said:

	... You should try to get your complaints about your cable company read by some celebrity on a DirecTV commercial. Funny stuff.
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February 23, 2010 | url
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America! F*ck YEAH said:

	... ...another great aspect of the game being on MSNBC - is that hockey fans, who never have to watch MSNBC, get to sit there and get hammered by Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow commericals... both of them having like 2 viewers at this point - but now you have to endure their faces and screed at every commercial. Ak...
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February 23, 2010
Votes: -1

Rob B said:

	... Am I the only one who's at least a little saddened that a Blame Canada title featured no South Park references?
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February 23, 2010 | url
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waltdetroit1 said:

	... Rob B: The mouth of the Vancouver Olympic symbol should have gone completely through the Head
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February 23, 2010
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KyleKujawa said:

... Blame Canada was the SP reference . But your complaint is duly noted; perhaps I will need to slip an SP reference in somewhere before the Olympics are over. Also, this is the Olympics, so let's not start a "which political commentators do you not like" thing. Besides, and correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not getting MSNBC obviously, but aren't those games commercial free? Maybe intermissions, but the online feeds actually cut out to commercials during stoppages of play, usually just a 15 second commercial and the play is resumed when they cut back.

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February 23, 2010
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Felanoo4741 said:

	... GO CANADA. BOO AMERICA CANADA WILL WIN GOLD
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February 23, 2010
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Voline said:

	... I cannot believe that you did not mention the awesome Keystone Kanucks routine: the Perry-Staal-Pronger 3-jerk pile-up.
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February 23, 2010
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Michael Smith said:

... Um, yeah, about the NBC coverage of hockey so far... YUCK! They bury it on MSNBC and give us the regular NBC/Versus crew. Sheesh. Doc and Enzo are poor substitutes for Thorne and Clement. And what's with non-stop curling on CNBC? Anyway, it was a great game between the US and Canada. Rafalski was awesome. I hope Babcock was taking notes as to how Team USA was using Rafalski. Team USA seemed to let Rafalski run a bit more. It seemed like Rafalski was pinching more and taking more shots than he would in the Red Wings system. The Red Wings seem to keep him in a more conservative role. Or, maybe when you're playing on the same team as Nick Lidstrom, that's just how it looks. From what I saw, the exuberant energy of youth of Team USA beat a more skilled, but less energized, Team Canada. The US seemed to be using a game plan of get the puck into the corner and work it until they could make an opportunity. Canada's plan seemed to rely too much on tic-tac-toe passing, or maybe it was the superstars just trying too hard to finesse things. Sure Canada took a lot of shots, but most of them hit Miller in the chest or the pads. If Canada and the US meet again in the medal round, it's gonna be a great game. It almost won't matter who wins because we know we're going to see some fantastic hockey.

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February 23, 2010 | url
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KeithD said:

	... 1. I'm Canadian 2. We have excellent Olympic / Olympic hockey coverage. 3. I was cheering for Russia (Datsyuk) 4. Canada really stepped up their play and were the better team 5. DID ANYONE ELSE NOTICE HOW DATSYUK SHUT DOWN CROSBY AND ENDED UP +1 IN THAT LOSS?
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February 25, 2010
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Coffey said:

... Canada is dominating the Olympics and leads in the most important count with 10 gold metals. We already showed our superior hockey talent by beating the US to win the womens gold. Our Sunday we will take the our second hockey gold with Crosby and Perry showing their superior hockey skills. You can't rely on your goalie again. Team USA is a fraud. Your speed skater Ohno is a cheating fraud. Gold Metals: Canada 10 (will be 11+ on Sunday) Germany 9 United States 8 Norway 8

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February 27, 2010
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KyleKujawa said:

	... Awful lotta garbage being spoken from a fan of the team that nearly lost to Switzerland AND Slovakia.
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February 27, 2010
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Joe L. said:

	... Yeah, you talk up that womens hockey team. Womens sports ftw! Canada sucks.
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February 27, 2010
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