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The Best Way to Watch a Thrilling Flyers Brawl and Shootout is With an ESPN Split Screen
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Best Flyers game in a long time. They dispatched the Pittsburgh Penguins 3-2 in a shootout that featured a line brawl at the end of overtime after two disallowed goals. Then Sam Ersson made the final save while we all watched on a screen that looked like this:
The double box just sort of came out of nowhere. There was only 15 or 20 seconds left in the overtime period when it popped up. Then you had the big brawl and the shootout and had to squint to get a better look at what was happening on the ice.
One of the things with the Frozen Frenzy schedule is that the league stuffs so many games into the schedule that obviously there’s significant overlap. In this case, on the ESPN main channel, it was Flyers/Yinzers at 6, Caps/Stars at 8:30, and then Kings/Sharks at 11:00 p.m. Everything else was on the ESPN app, which included eight games that were taking place at the same time as Flyers/Pens. Surely they just could have run a crawl at the bottom saying “Capitals vs. Stars is airing on ESPN+ , for the five people who care.” Then you just switch it over to the main channel after the Fly Guys take out the trash. Why didn’t they do that? Did we get any explanation? One one hand, not everyone has the ESPN app, so whereas you might bump something from ESPN to ESPN 2 on a typical cable setup, this Caps/Stars game might have been inaccessible entirely for some customers. No clue, just taking a guess. Maybe it was in the broadcast guidelines that they weren’t allowed to do that.
On the OTHER HAND, it’s Washington and Dallas in hockey and nobody cares. This was the battle for PA.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com