Flyers Resurgent, No Thanks To Cheating TV Network

When I last wrote about the Flyers, they had lost the Winter Classic in overtime and then lost a mess of a game in Ottawa. Fortunately, since then they've won three in a row. Wins at home over Toronto and Tampa Bay sandwiched the most impressive of the three wins, a 7-4 spanking of the Pittsburgh Penguins. The Pens are the defending Stanley Cup champs and have dominated the Flyers recently, both in the regular season and playoffs. So winning in their building is impressive.

It might have been even more of a one-sided game. Late in the second period with the Flyers up 5-3, Simon Gagne seemed to have scored a goal on a rebound but the puck was pulled out of the net by the goaltender. The on-ice officials ruled "no goal." There was a video review in the NHL's "War Room" in Toronto, but the call was not overturned because there was no conclusive evidence. A few minutes later, after the game resumed, Fox Sports Net Pittsburgh aired a replay that clearly showed the puck in the net.

The procedure for video review is that the networks televising the game feed the replays from all camera angles to Toronto, where they are reviewed. Since Comcast Sportsnet here used Pittsburgh's video feed for its telecast, it had nothing to send. Somehow the replay that showed the puck behind the goal line wasn't sent to Toronto by FSN Pittsburgh.

Now, after the fact, the NHL is investigating the network's failure to forward that particular video to Toronto:

It is not yet clear whether FSN Pittsburgh purposely excluded the angle or it was an unintentional oversight, though one Penguins announcer can be heard saying “we saved that one” on the broadcast.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

That comment could well have been a joke. My guess is that, even if someone purposely excluded sending that video, they won't admit it and probably nothing will come of it. A well-run league would institute safeguards to ensure that the "War Room" has every available video, but we all know the NHL isn't exactly a finely-tuned machine.

The Flyers, on the other hand, are now 7-1-1 in their last nine games and stand just one point out of the playoffs, with three fewer games played than 8th-place Montreal, and goalie Ray Emery is back with the team and available to play, having played with the AHL Phantoms on Saturday on a conditioning assignment. So things appear to be looking up again.