I suspect, though I'm not certain (I hope?), that I'm a somewhat typical hockey fan, in the sense of the highs and lows I go through watching my team play. More specifically, I find that my heart rate is highest, and I'm the twitchiest, when my team is losing a game that they could be winning.

Not deserve to be winning, necessarily, but could be winning. When that's the status of the game, the emotional impact of every little thing that happens on the ice is amplified three or fourfold. I find myself on my feet when the good guys are going north with numbers, and when something bad happens, I just burn.

I also find that when I'm in this, uh, state, two things that usually don't bother me too much suddenly become rather infuriating.

One is the reffing. It becomes unavoidable for me to starting doing the, "How can [that thing that the other guy just did] not be a penalty when he just called our guy for [doing something that didn't seem as bad] five minutes ago?" Last night it just ended up a bit off-balance, IMO... I'm not quite sure how to articulate this, but it was a situation where the final penalty tally didn't really reflect the balance of illegal/borderline plays. Or put another way, it was a pretty intense game with a fair bit of stickwork and near-dubious hits, and as a whole, I don't see how you could watch it and think the Flames cheated more than the Wings. (I should add that this reflects well on the Wings, i.e. aggressive enough to get me up in arms at times, but disciplined enough to stop just short of anything that would raise the ref's arm.)

The one specific question I do have is why Lilja didn't get an instigator penalty for going after Phaneuf. I've gotten the impression over the past several seasons that this is the prototypical scenario for calling the instigator penalty: Player A cranks Player B1, B2 hunts down A for a fight, B2 gets an instigator. That's how it went for both of Phaneuf's previous fights this season.

I'm pretty agnostic about the instigator penalty in general (though I don't think eliminating it would do squat in terms of protecting star players), but like most rules, I like to be able to understand them and see them applied consistently. Obviously last night, the whole situation hurt the Flames; their comeback prospects (such as they were) were hurt by Phaneuf going off for 5 with 7 minutes left in the game, and they didn't get the PP either, even though under the English definition (if not the NHL one) it was Lilja who instigated the fight.

Anyway... the second thing that goes from annoying to infuriating when the game's not going my way is bad colour commentary, and man was I ready to kick Charlie Simmer in the teeth last night.

As mentioned previously (see first 2 comments), Simmer has a comically romanticized view of his playing days. And as a bonus, it's also totally incoherent! Last night, after a hit from behind on Phaneuf (apparently, at any rate, they never replayed it) he said (I quote from memory): "It goes back to the issue of respect for your fellow players. In the old days, when a guy's back was turned, you'd wait for him to turn towards you, and then hit him." Riiiight.... you know, I don't mind a bit of chit-chat about how things worked better when the players policed themselves -- even though I don't really believe it, and btw there was NHL supplementary discipline in the old days too -- but this statement is clearly bullshit.

And it must be! -- because he regularly contradicts it with statements about how in the old days, players knew how to protect themselves better and not get into vulnerable positions. Why on earth they would have been concerned about this, back in the Golden Age when their opponents were so much more respectful of their safety, is a mystery that will surely be explained in a future telecast.

The real kicker though was after the Filppula goal to make it 5-3. The Flames were carrying the play, and Phaneuf had pinched, gained possession, circled behind the net, and gotten back to the point, whereupon he had a shot blocked and the play changed direction. At that moment, Nystrom and Lombardi were right on top of Osgood, and Nolan was headed toward the net after covering Phaneuf's spot. None of the 3 forwards were able to get back quickly, and Filppula scored as the trailer on a 4-on-2.

Simmer's take: "Well, Dion Phaneuf, it goes back to (yes he does say that a lot) understanding the flow of the game, and knowing when to go and not go."

Seriously Charlie? Phaneuf pinched in, while down a goal, in an effort to sustain zone pressure, and this was a bad decision? Even with the benefit of hindsight, showing that he didn't end up out of position? (Not to mention that if the shot gets through, it's a 2-on-Osgood while two Wings are holding hands over by the circle?) Time to reset my favourite take on this topic:

What's most shocking is how rarely ex-jocks provide this kind of understanding, and how superficial their apparent feel for the game they played can be. The theoretical benefit of having them in the booth is usually more than neutralized, if it's present at all, by their grudges and biases, their need to reassert their hard-won insider status [ding!], and their tiresome espousal of cliches originally developed to ward off reporters [ding ding!]. Since most booth athletes were winners on the field of play, they share a general interest in favouring disingenuous character-based explanations for losing and winning rather than technical ones [ding ding ding ding ding! Charlie Simmer, you are our winner!].

Which reminds me, I have one more TV gripe before I forget. I understand that, to a certain extent, what I'm bitching about here is a matter of taste; there are no doubt people who want little more from their colour analysts than the odd joke and some periodic warm fuzzies about the good old days. I do think though that there is some base level of "helping viewers understand what's going on in the game" that is rightly expected of hockey broadcasts.

Much of it is simply using replays effectively: did that goal deflect off of something, what was that penalty for, where was our d-man on that 3-on-1, etc. -- I suspect that hockey producers agree here.

In Thursday's game against the Hawks, their 1st goal was scored shorthanded when Alex Tanguay stepped onto the bench from the point, letting the puck coast by for a wide open breakaway. It was a strange play. Stranger still, though, was that the TV guys spent zero time attempting to show us why it happened. Presumably he was trying to avoid a Too Many Men penalty -- would he have gotten one, or was he confused? Was another Flame jumping on the ice, then held back?

In a 2.5 hour broadcast of a game that featured a total of 3 goals, these questions were never addressed, let alone answered. Why? If you don't want to bore the majority of your viewers with a bunch of technical blah-blah, then fine, but that even fell short of superficial.

Yep, the Flames have some work to do.