“Use your imagination.”
That was the advice Jack Edwards had for NESN viewers during the Bruins’ win over the Flames Saturday night as his frustration audibly boiled over during one of at least half a dozen incidents of the video feed freezing up in the middle of play.
The video feed freezing is not NESN’s fault. That feed is a world feed originating on-site in Calgary.
Jack Edwards not being able to tell viewers what is happening while the video is frozen is very much NESN’s fault.
NESN is still not sending its Bruins broadcast on the road. If it were, Edwards would be in the arena and able to describe what he is seeing with his own eyes, same as he does for home games. Instead, he is calling road games from NESN’s Watertown studios, forced to react only to the same video feed the rest of us are seeing.
Saturday night was an outlier in terms of how often the video feed froze, but it wasn’t an outlier in terms of Edwards and partner Andy Brickley not being able to provide the same insight and information for road games that they do for home games.
If you’ve watched enough Bruins this season, you’ve heard Edwards be hesitant or unable to identify a player in real-time. It is much harder for him to do that when a player comes flying into the picture at the last second than it is when he’s standing high above the ice and able to see every player on the ice at all times. There have also been times when they haven’t been able to tell if or when a goalie has been pulled. Insights about something happening behind the play or on the bench have been lost, too.
Edwards publicly expressed his displeasure with the situation in an interview with The Athletic in October, saying that while he understands the financial reasoning behind NESN’s decision, “they know I’m not going to like it.”
“I hear it in many announcers’ voices when they’re calling games from the studio. I’m not alone in this,” Edwards told Fluto Shinzawa. “It’s frustrating. But as the saying goes, that decision is made way above my pay grade.”
It’s a disservice to viewers, and one that NESN’s owners can certainly afford to fix no matter how much they claim their hands are tied. The network is owned 80% by Fenway Sports Group and 20% by Delaware North. FSG was valued at over $7 billion earlier this year and just bought a whole other NHL team. Forbes values Delaware North at $3.7 billion.
The Athletic reported in that same article that NESN “intends to reassess road travel at the beginning of 2022.” If they need any convincing, Saturday night’s broadcast would make for a good reminder of why this current setup shouldn’t be acceptable.
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