Enjoying Ice Hockey from the Sofa: Hi-Def Flat Screens Outdo FoxTrax

At 8 p.m. tonight, millions of viewers - including many people whose sentences end in the word "eh" - will turn their TVs, unless they've somehow missed the digital TV switchover, to NBC, for a decisive Game Seven of the Stanley Cup finals.

 

Here in the New York area, the attention of sports fans will be distracted by the so-called "Subway Series" between the New York Mets and Yankees, to get underway in the Bronx about an hour earlier. Many of us - even for an edge-of-your-seat seventh game in a major sport - would prefer to watch the baseball game over the hockey contest between - as Santiago from Hemingway's masterful "The Old Man and the Sea" would say - Red Wings of Detroit and Penguins of Pittsburgh.

 

Hockey has tried all kinds of ways to sway viewers its way, most recently, following 310-day lockout that started in September 2004, by tweaking the games rules to give it more flow and excitement.

 

It hasn't really worked, and the timing of tonight's final, coinciding with what Major League Baseball calls "Rivalry Week," is very bad news for the NHL.

 

More than a decade ago, some sports buffs might remember, Fox Sports made a bunch of people angry by creating its so-called "FoxTrax" puck, which used digital technology to track its often vision-blurring path on the ice.

 

The puck emitted a red trail whenever it passed the 75 mph mark. All Fox Sports did was cut the puck open, add some sensors and then put a signaling system atop the plexiglass that surrounds the rink. The puck spat out signals 30 times per second from its infrared emitters. At the time - more than a dozen years ago - it must have seemed like a very good idea.

 

But hockey purists didn't buy it, and today - this is purely opinion - the high definition available on increasingly inexpensive flat-screen and LCD TVs has made that kind of effort unnecessary.

 

My brother, a big sports fan, has one of those TVs and - unless he goes to tonight's Yanks-Mets game, as he's threatening to - I may head over to his place to watch the Stanley Cup final in comfort.

 

Baseball is a long season, after all.