The need to divide the TV deal

Since my most recent hockey rants have related to the horrible handling of the hockey media, especially from Comcast, I thought that I would add one more thought before finally moving on. If Comcast is paying to televise east coast hockey, why are we giving them the West?

I know that hockey isn’t among the most popular sports here in our crappy country, but there should still be a way to work out deals with multiple networks. If the NHL would be kind enough to look for someone who wants to televise games for the Western half of the country, the Western half of the country would appreciate it.

For starters, we could get games at better times. I might not have a traditional 9-5 job, but a lot of people do. Games that start at 4 are less than ideal for a significant portion of this country’s population. More importantly, Western teams would actually get some coverage.

This isn’t just about accessibility to games. As I have said before, bias is unavoidable. If it can’t be eliminated, we should work to reduce the damages. A network with a deal for the Western Conference television rights would likely prefer Western teams over the east. This would create a Western Conference bias to partially compensate for the already unbearable eastern bias. There would be no question as to which bias would be more influential, but anything to offset some of our current problems would be an improvement.

I won’t pretend that this common sense idea is flawless. Detroit and Columbus would get a lot of attention just because they are in the most media-friendly time zone. After that, they would target Chicago since it’s time zone is still media-friendly and Chicago is an overpopulated market. Of course, I would expect a network to feel like they have to showcase more than just a few teams. Californians who are out of town would absolutely love the opportunity to see their teams play more than once or twice a year.

Recently, the NHL tried to push through a realignment plan (that clearly provided preferential treatment to the northeast) and failed. This realignment wouldn’t work as well with this idea. Instead of two conferences, they were going to use four. This would have made a second deal a little tougher to pull off, but they could always take that configuration and bundle the two Western conferences in one deal and the two embarrassing conferences in the other.

There are reasons that the media gives preferential treatment to the east. A Western Conference television deal couldn’t bring in as much money, and likely wouldn’t carry much appeal to our east coast networks. It’s just that Comcast doesn’t even want the West. It’s like the NHL sold them the rights to just the east with a guarantee that they wouldn’t let other networks compete. Perhaps this can help their bottom line in the short term, but alienating half the nation seems like a questionable long-term approach. Even if they had to give away the rights (or even paid a network) for the better half of the country, it would be an improvement to the garbage that we have in place today.