The Toronto Maple Leafs Need a TV Overhaul (It’s Brutal)

The Toronto Maple Leafs played a really good game last night.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are also a fourth place team in the entire league, and given the parity of the salary capped league, where goalies and refs are the most influential participants of most games, that puts them within the margin of error from being the best team in hockey.

You wouldn’t know it watching the TV broadcasts.

The stale, boring, uninspired TV broadcasts.

Chris Cuthbert, Craig Simpson, Gord Miller, Mike Johnson, Ron McLean and every single person currently involved in an intermission on either broadcasts need to go.

The Toronto Maple Leafs TV Broadcasts are desperate for new blood, innovation, and most of all, someone who isn’t going out of their way to be neutral.

Toronto Maple Leafs TV Broadcasts Are Garbage

I was going to write about last night’s game, but I thought way more about how crappy the broadcast was while it was on than I did about the actual game.

Hockey is an exciting, dynamic game that gets treated like golf on TV.

First of all, there is nothing interesting on any broadcast – the announcers are boring, neutral, passive and inane.  The intermissions are like cable access shows, but worse. In a word, they are “unwatchable.”

Joe Bowen may be a hard person to like, but at least he gets excited about the team.  The Leafs should get rid of him too, but the people they need to bring in should be Leafs fans.  When Nylander was stripped of the puck in overtime last night, the announcer should have been up in arms about the non-call.  Who cares if it really was a penalty, we need guys who want the team to win.

Instead, we get guys who go way out of their way to try not to seem biased, and who spend the entire night talking about the opposition.

The refs, league and other players all hate the Leafs, but we, the fans, deserve announcers who are with us.

Secondly, these guys have to get with the times. I shouldn’t hear a thing about faceoffs or plus/minus during a 2023 broadcast.

The shows need to teach and to entertain in order to be good. Today, they do neither.  To those in charge at Rogers and Sportsnet, you desperately need to fire whoever is currently producing these  games and put someone under 50 in charge, preferably me.

If I was in charge, all announcers would be exciting, and would be fans of the team they announce for.  I wouldn’t relegate women to token positions, and I would lean into the danger of hockey and make a broadcast that has actual entertainment – musicians, comedians, varied voices, new ideas.

Who actually wants to see a cable-news style round-table of white people in their 50s and 60s trying desperately to not get made fun of on twitter?  “Hey can we please get some more medium warm takes from another 55 year old white guy?”

No offense to Kevin Bieksa, but his leadership clearly came from the example he set, because this guy has the charisma of unfinished drywall – and he might be the best they have to offer!

I can’t take any more Craig Simpson, Gord Miller or Ron McLean. For the love of whatever deity or being you believe in, let’s bring some action into the game.

Hockey is an underdog sport, with a 3rd line mentality – let’s get some punk rock attitude into the broadcasts. It’s a dangerous game, let’s lean into that.  Let us make people uncomfortable, let’s challenge them, entertain them and let’s do it by making the best game in the world fun to watch on TV.

To start with, every single producer, director, play-by-play, colour, or intermission personality needs to be replaced.  The format needs a complete and total overhaul.