Friday, January 11, 2008

Calgary Flames Announcers Hit New Low

I've never been a big fan of Roger Millions and Charlie Simmer as announcers. Not because I'm an Avalanche fan but because I find them to be terribly biased and annoying.

However all announcers are biased towards their home teams to a degree and most are annoying as well so I try to just shrug them off.

Tonight though, I felt more like flipping them off. The Flames were hosting the Islanders and tied at 4 with a few minutes left, I decided to tune in. What I ended up seeing was ridiculous.

Midway through a 4-minute powerplay, the Flames called a timeout and the folks in the booth decided to show the Bumper to Bumper "Bump of the Night". Now of course I'm expecting to see a hit from Phaneuf so everybody can swoon over big bad Dion.

Not this time. It turns out that the bump of the night had Cory Sarich boarding Mike Comrie head first into the boards. Comrie was slow to get up and it was obvious that it should have been a penalty.



Now, to their credit the announcers weren't too amped up about the hit and one of them even grudgingly admitted that "They might have had a penalty call on that". Of course, he finished that sentence with "But there wasn't" just to drive home that no penalty = no foul.

Then, as I was waiting for my lame video capture to be uploaded to YouTube for the world to see, I watched the rest of the game including the post-game show. And do you know who they called arrogant? Rick DiPietro.

I couldn't believe my ears. Now I haven't seen every single interview Rick's ever given but in any interview I've seen he's about as down to earth and humble as it gets. Every post-game he's thanking the fans for making it such a great game and just seems like an all around decent guy.

Considering he's a handsome multi-millionaire living in New York City, I think he could be a lot worse.