Monday night saw a new innovation in the way hockey fights are presented on television. During a TSN broadcast of the 2024 Memorial Cup, the national championship of the Canadian Hockey League, a cameraman skated on the ice to film a fight happening between the London Knights and the Moose Jaw Warriors. Gator Anderson of 97.1 The Ticket in Detroit saw the video and talked about it during Karch & Anderson.
“The video shows two guys squaring off to fight and it’s a normal camera angle,” Anderson said. “And then you see the angle from the cameraman who skates out onto the ice to get a closer look. He is literally skating around in a circle as the fight is going on…It’s totally different than you would see on cameras fixed in the crowd. It’s pretty cool, it gives a different perspective, there’s a little more motion involved, and it seems pretty cool.”
Anderson then talked about a separate video which shows the cameraman filming the fight, who is dressed in all white. “It’s kind of surreal to see that,” he continued. “You’re watching this fight take place and all of a sudden you see this guy who has a white outfit, white camera, white helmet, white skates, white everything to blend in. I love when sports tries to be innovative with camera angles, or however it is they present their product. This is one of those things that is pretty cool. We have seen the innovations in football where they put the cameras on the wires and now, we have drones.”
As Karch was out, Anderson asked his producer, Khang Huynh, what he thinks of all of the new innovations in covering games and whether or not he likes it.
“I do,” he said. “It’s trial and error. You’re not going to love all of it, but I like the ‘try’ part, that’s how you know if something works or not. The drone stuff is great.”
Anderson then mentioned what the NHL and TNT did recently with an ‘NHL DataCast’ alternate broadcast of an Oilers-Stars playoff game on truTV and Max.
The NHL described that broadcast as “a new analytics-driven alternative viewing experience on truTV and Max. The broadcast will use cutting edge data and real-time in-depth insights from NHL EDGE positional data (NHL Puck and Player Tracking) to provide deeper context and understanding of how statistics are utilized by players, coaches and front offices across the National Hockey League. NHL EDGE IQ powered by AWS advanced analytics, including Face-Off Probability, Opportunity Analysis and Ice Tilt, will also be featured. “
“Everybody is trying to find new ways to get people to check things out and I thought that was pretty cool, too,” Anderson said.
