things to look for in tonight's game coverage

Yeah. That's right. I said game coverage.

I won't bore you with the "create traffic in front of the net" and "keep hepatitis boy off the scoresheet" and other crap like that. The Canes know what they have to do, and likewise for the Devils.

I wanted to write something about this the other day anyway, but I didn't get around to it until just now.

A lot of fans in Carolina have been bellyaching about the announcing crew on OLN and NBC, saying that they have been biased against the Canes. I've been to both playoff games, watched the DVR of those games afterwards. In the first round, we weren't getting any OLN/NBC coverage, so this pertains only to the second round. I don't think the announcers were biased at all. I thought they gave fair time to both teams, and their analysis has been pretty fair and level. They're used to (and I am also very used to) the insanely blind homer commentary of John Forslund and Tripp Tracy, who are paid by the Canes to announce for Fox Sports South. I can understand the uncomfortability of shifting from the known (Forslund and Tracy) to the unfamiliar (OLN and NBC). I can even understand preferring to mute the TV and tune into Canes radio feed. That's an old trick used around here by college basketball fans.

Anyway, I don't think they've treated us unfairly. I encourage the Canes fans who are reading this to actually pay attention to what's being said. They're not going to gush about the Canes, and they don't gush about the Devils either. But I actually think that Brian Engblom has been sort of gushy about the Canes. Anyway, I encourage everyone, especially my fellow Canes fans to actually pay attention and develop a rational opinion about the coverage of this series.

Okay. On a similar note, my fellow Canes fans are completely familiar with the antics of Ray Whitney. Red Wings fans must also know that he's a bit of a clown. In a good way. We've seen him hijack pregame on-ice interviews with other players. He always finds a way to pop his face into the picture. I noticed that he managed to do it the other night in game 2. For all the people outside the FSN South viewing area, pay special attention tonight to any on-ice interview done with a Canes player. I guarantee that at some point, Whitney will slowly skate by and deliberately get in the shot and act like a total ham. He does some really funny stuff. That alone is often worth the price of admission.

Thirdly, I noticed that on Saturday, NBC did something funny in their coverage of the Canes game. During the intermission reports, they would cut to the studio for analysis by the guys. Nothing unusual about that. Behind them was a large screen with a live shot of the arena. Nothing unusual about that. HOWEVER, (if you still have the DVR of this, check it out) they made it look like we have tiny blimps flying around the arena during intermission, presumably distributing prizes. We don't have those. There haven't been tiny blimps in the arena since the Greensboro days. I don't know why they did this, but it was a deliberate manipulation of the video to make it look that way. Did anyone else notice this? Anyone have any ideas about why they would do this? No, by the way, the "blimps" were not displaying the NBC logo, so it wasn't a branding thing.