Well, that was a fun evening wasn't it?
The Blackhawks attempted to travel to sunny tropical Detoilet yesterday, to face the Read Wings in a game that no one in Chicago will ever realize happened, because it wasn't televised. Clown shoes ensued....
I have MANY issues with the way this shitshow went down, so let me begin:
Travel - The average flight from Chicago to Detroit is an hour and twenty minutes, plus time to get through security and all the normal air travel shennanigans. The average travel by bus would be somewhere around four hours and thirty minutes. To make a long story short, the Blackhawks were delayed, for whatever reason, and didn't end up at "The Joe" until roughly 7:35 PM local time. The game was schedukled to BEGIN at 7:30PM, so right there, you can see a problem. Once they actually arrive, they have to get in the lockerroom, get the gear sorted out, and actually warm up. In 40 minutes. Now I'm not sure if you ever saw the CSN specials about just what goes into getting a team moved around, but this is a near impossible feat. Props to the Blackhawks equipment guys for even getting the team on the ice. Anyhow, this is a professional team that needs some kind of game preparation. Warm-ups; stretching; maybe just more than five minutes to throw their gear on. This isn't mens league. When all was said and done, the team was able to start the game at 8:15 local time, with hardly any warmups. It's amazing they didn't lose 10-0.
Lesson - The moral of this sad tale is that the Blackhawks should not have relyed on air travel, on a Thursday afternoon to get to a Thursday evening game in Detoilet. They skated in the morning, so we know they couldn't have been flying out until roughly noon. WHY TEMPT FATE? Scratch the morning skate, throw the kids on a couple charter busses and sent them away in the morning. Anyone with a brain should have realized that.
TV/Radio - Every year I throw a tantrum about this, and every year it happens again. Two of the six Blackhawks preseason games are not carried on any visual media.
In 2014
The Blackhawks cannot manager to even STREAM the game.
This gets better.
Not only are we supposed to be happy with listening to this game on the radio, but the channel we are supposed to listen to (87.7 The Game); cannot be tuned to on a decent portion of modern radios.
"No problem", says The Game. "Use our wonderful smartphone app", they proclaim. But don't use it while driving, because operating your phone while driving is illegal.
All that aside, when trying to tune into The Game's handy dandy fancy smartphone app...it crashes. When it doesn't crash, the stream won't connect. The game had already begun by the time the app was fixed. So the Blackhawks, a professional sport franchise that was once fluke game seven goal from playing in their third Stanley Cup Final since 2010, were playing a game, pre-season albeit, that no one in Chicago knew anything about, unless they got updates through Twitter. WHAT. THE. FUCK. BLACKHAWKS.
THE CONTEST - Yes, the game was actually played. The Blackhawks lost 3-2, and I'm not wasting my time breaking down box scores of a game that no one in the Blackhawks organization cared if we saw. They came out as flat as you would expect; to a Joe Louis arena that was virtually empty.
"Shut up, it's only the stupid preseason", the twatterverse proclaims. Well, I care and so do many other Blackhawks fans. Maybe I wanted to see what Garrett Ross looked like. Maybe I wanted to watch Victor Svedberg. I care about preseason, so shut up if you don't.
The real kicker to all of this is that the Chicago FAA radar headquarters had a fire early this morning. As I type this, the beat writers are all stranded in Detroit, because all air traffic in and out of Chicago has been halted.
