TORONTO — There’s an elitist element to being a media member attending playoff games in Toronto this postseason.
While almost all radio, TV, and print folks are covering these games from their respective home offices or living rooms, there’s usually about seven to 12 of us watching the games in person.
It’s a strange opportunity.
If you pro-rated my seat, with 11 other people watching, outside of team and league personnel downstairs, based on a conservative average playoff ticket price in Toronto of $400, my chair is worth $621,600.
Silly, yes, but the fact is, we’re getting a private viewing of something that should have about 18,700 people in attendance.
There is so much space around me that my little table in section 305, reserved for Pittsburgh Hockey Now and the other Hockey Now affiliates, feels like a private office.
It’s chilly cold. I wear a sweatshirt over my clothes for each game, but there’s something very comfortable and reassuring about it.
It’s a great place to get work done. No one is here to bother me, and over the top of my laptop I have a view of a Stanley Cup Playoff game.
The routine is simple and easy.
Entering from Maple Leaf Square, I walk and climb through a short maze of doors and stairs to the second floor of the Scotiabank Arena.
Through the media door I am met by the guy or gal who asks me the routine Covid-exposure questions and takes my temperature.
They put a little paper wristband on me, signifying that yes, once again, I am healthy enough to attend. Then a quick hello through security and a bag check, “hi-how-are-you” to a couple of the NHL PR folks, and into the elevator.
One floor later I walk into what’s normally a bar adjacent to the concourse on the 300-level. I walk down that concourse to the curtain that drapes over the entrance to sections 306-305. Through the curtain, I turn and climb 24 little steps to row 12.
During that walk down the dimmed hallway I usually see a maximum of one other person, normally a security guard sitting in a chair looking at their cell phone.
Or I see someone I’ve known for ten or twenty years, but they don’t recognize me behind my mask and I’m not always sure I recognize them.
Hockey Now’s particular viewpoint is probably the best for watching the game.
Higher than where scouts would sit, but in the position they like, at an angle where you can see down the boards on both sides and note the action at both ends.
So far that action has been tantalizing in small doses.
I have documented the “bubble-affect” on these players and on these teams.
What drove Bruins starting netminder Tuukka Rask to head home after Game 2 of Round 1 has an influence on many of these players.
No family and no fans, sucks. Most of the qualifying round series wrapped up in four games, most of the first round in five.
Typically the first round is the craziest. Not this year; teams are checking out. But there could be a very positive side effect for the later rounds.
Teams will be so committed, so desperate and pissed off about being in the bubble for about six weeks by the time the conference finals start, we’re gonna see some really intense, hard fought hockey.
Let’s hope so.
Either way, huge props to these guys who fight their way through it. And congratulations again to the league for pulling it off.
Yes, motivated by ad revenue and sponsor commitments, it’s also a commitment to Lord Stanley’s chalice. With labor peace looming wonderfully for the next half-dozen years, why not do what one can to make a Cup presentation?
I’m moving on after this round.
I may or may not be working some coverage in Edmonton for the conference finals and the Cup Finals.
Regardless, outside of being at New York Rangers games with a grapefruit-size lump in my throat shortly after 9-11, this has easily been the most unusual hockey experience in my many decades around the game.
I hope to hell we never have to go through it again.
Longtime NHL broadcaster and journalist Rob Simpson is covering the NHL return at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto for FloridaHockeyNow.com, NYIhockeyNow.com and BostonHockeyNow.com.