We've had some highly anticipated regular season matchups in recent seasons, but perhaps none bigger- especially for a November tilt- than what's on tap for tomorrow night.
The 9-0-1 Florida Panthers, who are 6-0-0 on home ice, entertaining the 9-0-0 Carolina Hurricanes in a potential Eastern Conference final preview. It's two Stanley Cup hopefuls, the top teams in the conference, and the teams to beat from the Atlantic and Metropolitan Divisions, respectively. The two deepest rosters, perhaps, in the entire National Hockey League, will go head-to-head tomorrow night at 6:00 PM in Sunrise. Get your tickets NOW!
Doug Plagens' Panthers Mailbag: Priskie's Debut, Cats are Hot
Congratulations are in order to Chase Priskie, whose NHL debut on Thursday was a monumental day for not only Priskie and his family, but also for the Panthers, and the entire South Florida hockey community. November 4, 2021 was the day a South Florida-bred hockey player suited up for his hometown NHL team, and it'll forever go down as one of the most important days in Panthers history.
Lastly, I want to issue a huge thanks to all of you great Panthers fans who've helped make FLA Live Arena a huge home-ice advantage for the team. The Panthers are 6-0-0 on home ice after Thursday's win over Washington, and your energy has not gone unnoticed. We hope to see all of you again very soon; perhaps as early as tomorrow!
Now, a few questions!
@hawk954: I have to ask what is your ultimate favorite Halloween candy & what is the one you consider to be absolute trash? Soup still shreds by the way… #DearDoug
Shawn The Hawk! Great to hear from you here, sir! Here's a question from last week, but it's never a bad time to talk about candy!
My opinion on candy is often very controversial; everyone here knows I'm a magnet for food controversy. The whole soup consuming community is after me! Kidding… I'm a big coconut fan, so my favorite Halloween candy to receive was always Mounds and Almond Joy. Unfortunately, I learned at a very young age that Mounds and Almond Joy would generally make up such a small percentage of my Trick-or-Treating haul that I questioned whether or not it was worth the time to walk up and down the street for a couple hours to maybe end up with 10 total Mounds and Almond Joy's. I guess I took an analytics-based approach to Halloween Candy as a kid. By about seventh grade, I realized it was a much better use of my time and energy to buy a bag of Mounds and Almond Joy at a fine retailer near me, and skip the Trick-or-Treating part of Halloween. I came out of retirement for one final Trick-or-Treating experience with a few friends during our senior year of high school in an effort to harken back to our youths.
To this day, any candy with coconut and/or dark chocolate is still what I'll gravitate toward. As far as a candy I don't like… I was never a Dots guy. I wouldn't call them "absolute trash", but I wouldn't put them high up on my wish list either.
@Jreidy56: How much do you use analytics in broadcast preparation, do you have a metric that is a favorite to tell you about a team's performance?
Great question from a longtime "friend of the program"! For multiple reasons, I don't get too much into new-age "analytic" stats on the broadcasts. First of all, anyone who has listened over the years probably has noticed that I'm not a huge stats guy. Stats are obviously important, and they tell us a lot, but on radio, they can be tough to follow. Television has the luxury of showing graphics, and perhaps illustrating the in-depth importance of certain statistics a bit more than we do on radio.
When I was still calling games for the Lake Erie Monsters of the American Hockey League, I actually reached out to one of my all-time favorite broadcasters to critique a sample of my work; the late, great Dave Strader. He couldn't have been nicer, and took time to send me a detailed critique via email. One of the pointers he gave me was to be careful of throwing out too many statistics in a short time, because overloading the audience with numbers could cause listeners to lose track of the information. I thought this was very accurate.
If we're talking about a stat that I feel truly measures how successful a team has been and will be, my favorite is five-on-five goal differential. If you look at this stat year-over-year, it's generally a great measuring tool and shows the separation between the different tiers of teams. Sure, you'll always have some outliers and teams who rely heavily on a lethal power play for offense, but much more often than not, a great five-on-five team is a playoff team, and a bad five-on-five team is going to struggle.
Overall, I think too many "complicated" stats on radio are somewhat unnecessary, and don't add to the quality of a broadcast. Some of this information can be hugely valuable to a coach or a GM, but for the sake of putting together an easy-to-follow broadcast of the fastest game on Earth, I personally think that overloading the audience with numbers that may not mean much to a lot of casual fans who just want to root for their favorite team can detract from a radio broadcast. That said, if there's a Panthers player who is extremely good in a certain area, we will specifically make mention of it and point it out; such as Carter Verhaeghe, well-known, documented, and quantifiable ability to win puck battles.
I'd love to hear from the listeners on this!
@_OttoMaddux: If you were a player and could pick your goal song, what would it be?
Great question! I couldn't use "Bro Hymn" from Pennywise because it's already the Anaheim Ducks goal song, and it has been for about 15 years. Because of this, I'll say the song that I consider to be the best goal song that nobody is using as a goal song, and I've thought this for years!
"Bang the Doldrums" by Fallout Boy has the sort of chorus that lends itself to goal songs and arena interactivity. It's also by Fallout Boy; a band that, like them or not, is huge and has bigtime recognition. Also, this song is from an era that I consider to be part of a good and important era of Fallout Boy; it's on the "Thnks Fr Th Mmrs", "Hum Hallelujah" album, Infinity on High. It's also not an "A-list" Fallout Boy song, so you'd never have to worry about anyone suggesting that it's overdone or overplayed in any way.
Play the song, listen to the chorus, and visualize someone having just scored a goal and an arena getting excited. I think it works, and therefore it would be my personal goal song!
I've been saying it for years, but I think it's only a matter of time before some team, somewhere, discovers this one and uses it!
As always, thanks for the questions, folks!
'Til next time…
