FS Carolinas Releases Hurricanes TV Schedule - 65 Games Slated

No televised pre season games?

Nope, you will have to listen to Chuck

Anyone have link to JR’s interview on 850 the buzz? I missed it.

DId anyone hear Rutherford on the Buzz yesterday? I had a lot going on and heard mention of the VS schedule and how the Storm Squad was so professional.

I heard most of it. It started about him being a baseball fan and watching a lot of that during the summer. David Glenn asked him if the Hurricanes were the first team to come up with the Storm Squad idea, and JR said no, other teams had tried it before, but maybe the idea never clicked like it did here. He was proud of the professional way that the girls acted and since this was a family environment at the RBC, he was pleased with the way the Storm Squad fits within that. It’s not like that in some other markets.

When asked about the Versus snub, JR did not mince words. He said there was no good reason for the Canes to be left off the schedule and it goes against what the league is trying to do. (sound familiar?) The league puts teams in the non-traditional markets and tries to get them going, and then the television network ignores them? It’s not right. Plus, the Hurricanes have an exciting team to watch and their ratings are not bad. He does not get it. We have two stars of the league in Eric Staal and Cam Ward that people around the league want to watch. If the network is required to show Alex Ovechkin or Sid Crosby every game, then at least show a game when the Canes play one of those teams. He said that he could almost understand it if the team was not a good team and they were boring with no chance to make the playoffs, but after what the team accomplished last season, that is certainly not the case.

Then they talked about Friesen’s 5K. This is all from memory, I might have forgotton something.

There can be no other explanation. Those are all good legit points. Just jump on the Canes hater’s bandwagon. We will see you in the finals you bunch of jackasses.

Maybe when VS shows up in Raleigh for the ECF, Rutherford will refuse them access to the Press Cafe.

I did hear him saying something on the Buzz like how embarrassing it will be for the VS team to cover the Canes in a late Playoff series (and he covered himself that this was hypothetical not a predicion so as to appease the h-gods – relax!) without ever having shown a regular season game.

Going back to the Buffalo ratings on VS issue – if it’s all about local markets like Forslund said, does the first year of the VS-NHL contract correspond to the big year Buffalo had – was it 06-07? I haven’t figured that out, but would make sense that when everyone was hopping on the Sabre bandwagon ih upstate NY, if that was when VS was determining where their best markets were in the first year of coverage, Buffalo ratings might have looked so strong. (and the Canes wouldn’t have). From then on, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.