Rich Shertenlieb was away from home on Tuesday night and wanted to watch some hockey. Between NHL broadcasting options and hotels not having traditional cable packages, he was forced to log into NESN 360 to watch the Bruins play.
Unfortunately, the app was not cooperating. If Rich was going to watch hockey, it wasn’t going to be the Bruins. That is when he stumbled on to the most unique presentation of NHL hockey ever.
“In conjunction with the Disney Channel, the NHL did something crazy,” he explained on Wednesday’s edition of Toucher & Rich. “And they’re a league that does everything to ruin the viewership of the product by streaming games in different places. For example, the Connor McDavid versus the Bruins game was hidden from the world on ESPN+, and that was a marquee showcase. They did one thing right.”
Disney XD used its popular cartoon series Big City Greens as the theme of the presentation.
“They had that game being played on Disney except everyone of the players was a cartoon character from that deal,” Shertenlieb explained to the 98.5 The Sports Hub audience. “On top of that, Kevin Weekes, and I forget who the other broadcaster was, like real NHL broadcasters, were these giant cartoon people and it was fascinating. It was absolutely fascinating.”
Computers used tracking information from the puck and from devices embedded in players’ jerseys to animate the action nearly in real-time. Everything on the screen looked like characters and environments from the cartoon series. There was only a 20 second delay between the live game and the broadcast.
“I have never wanted edibles more in my life,” Shertenlieb said, joking that he wondered how the animators would have handled a truly gruesome injury on the ice.
Toucher and Rich have had both the NHL and NESN in their crosshairs recently. It isn’t a surprise that Shertenleib’s frustration with the $30 per month app or the NHL’s inability to make content easy to find led to the discovery of the Big City Greens game on Disney XD. Rich Shertenlieb was glad it worked out like it did.
“It was exactly what the doctor ordered”.
