Welcome back to another edition of #DearDoug! Thanks for all the great questions this week! Remember, you can send them anytime on Twitter @DougPlagens, and if you don't see yours, it may appear in a future mailbag!
Before I get into the questions, how about the Panthers 3-2 win last night over Dallas? The Panthers are a perfect 6-0-0 responding to losses after their comeback a night ago, and they continue to find ways to win games. I've mentioned this on the air, but the Panthers are showing great consistency this season, and it's a sign of a really good team. Whether they're ahead, trailing, or tied in a game, the game they're playing looks the same. That also shows a great deal of confidence across the board.
The Panthers are among the best teams in the league in one-goal games, when allowing the first goal, and they have more comeback wins than anyone in the league. Add that to the fact that the Panthers haven't let a loss turn into back-to-back losses this season… and it tells you that this '20-21 Panthers squad is the real deal.
And now, your questions…
Doug Plagens' Panthers Mailbag Volume Three
@JoshuaBenchimol: #DearDoug on the away Panthers games you broadcast from the BB&T Center, which screen do you call the games on? The Jumbotron or your screens in the booth?
Great question, and a topical one at that! Obviously, the '20-21 season has brought about some unique aspects! One difference is that Bill Lindsay and I are calling every game, home and road, from our radio booth at the BB&T Center. First of all, I need to give a huge shout-out and thank you to our technical staff at our radio home, 560 WQAM The Joe, and to our technical staff at the BB&T Center for the assistance they've provided us in making sure we have everything we need to handle our road broadcasts from the home booth!
As for the setup, the best way to summarize the configuration is this: the NHL provides us a with a video stream that is accompanied by the on-ice sound effects and public address announcements from the road arena. We access that video feed on a laptop, and run it onto a huge monitor in the radio booth. We connect to WQAM using the same broadcast equipment that we use for home games, and we run the audio from the NHL's video feed into our sound effects channel, and it sounds like we're there! Hockey is challenging to broadcast off a monitor because of the speed, but we're making it work!
@fakejedega: #DearDoug do you have a favorite away arena you like calling games in?
Let me preface it with this… There's something unique and special about every NHL arena, and I feel fortunate every time I step into one that I'm able to do this for a living! If I had to narrow it down to just a few, for a few different reasons, the top-tier would be the following:
Madison Square Garden in New York and Bell Centre in Montreal tie for the most unique "buzz" feeling in the building. Walking in and seeing the banners and retired numbers in each arena is a built-in history lesson. The scene at United Center in Chicago during Jim Cornelison's renditions of the National Anthem might be unlike anything else in sports, and I just love the character and press box view at the Scotiabank Saddledome in Calgary.
However, being from Michigan, Joe Louis Arena was the best. It lacked some in terms of press box amenities, but that was the arena I visited all the time as a kid, and during Red Wings games, I'd look up at the press box and just wonder what was going on up there! I'm very thankful that I got to call games there my first couple seasons with the Panthers; that was pretty special. As much as I loved "The Joe", the new Little Caesars Arena in Detroit is an absolute gem in every way, too.
@KensterFox: @DougPlagens @NHLdotcom Did your affinity for the Golden Girls have any impact on you taking a job in South Florida?
I am a huge Golden Girls fan, but they weren't the reason I moved to South Florida; the Panthers were! Here's the condensed version of the "How I ended up in South Florida" story…
In my previous job, I worked in Cleveland and handled broadcasting and public relations for the Lake Erie Monsters of the American Hockey League and the Cleveland Gladiators of the Arena Football League (Both were owned by my employer, the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers). One weekday afternoon in August, 2015, I was on the sidelines of a Gladiators practice and scrolling on Twitter, and I saw the news posted that Randy Moller was moving from radio to television for the Panthers. As is the case for any AHL broadcaster, my ultimate goal had always been to call games in the NHL, so I immediately thought, "I wonder if the Panthers radio job will be open?"
By the time I arrived home from work that day, the Panthers vacant radio play-by-play position had indeed been posted. I had all my application materials ready, so I immediately sent everything out as the job posting suggested. The process moved quickly because we were already nearing the end of August, and after a few talks with Randy Moller and the Panthers, I was fortunate enough to be offered the opportunity to join the Panthers as the radio broadcaster! It's been every bit the dream-come-true that I hoped it would be, and I hope everyone out there enjoys our broadcasts as much as we enjoy bringing them to you.
Back to Golden Girls though; it's one of my favorite shows! I often stay up in to the wee hours of the morning watching it. On #BaseballTrip19, my friend Adrian Denny (Radio voice of the AHL's Tucson Roadrunners) and I considered driving to the Golden Girls' house outside Los Angeles, but it just didn't fit our schedule that day. We'd already spent part of the afternoon driving to The Brady Bunch house, and had to get to Dodger Stadium! Perhaps in future #DearDoug mailbags, I'll elaborate on the baseball trips that Adrian and I have taken every Summer since 2011. I won't however, elaborate on much new TV, but if you want to talk old TV, I'm in!
@yodiwan1: @DougPlagens @FlaPanthers @560WQAM #deardoug we know you love baseball cards, but what about hockey cards? What is your holy grail card? Who/what teams do you like to collect?
I'll try to keep this somewhat short because I could be very long-winded on this subject! I love all sports cards! Baseball and hockey are the sports I've collected the most since I was a kid. For modern baseball, I prefer Topps, Topps Chrome and Bowman. For hockey, I like to collect vintage cards and assorted Panthers!
As far as 'Holy Grail' cards in my collection… I have a number of cards that I could never part with: My collection of early Wayne Gretzky's, 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. rookies, 1998 Bowman and Bowman Chrome Peyton Manning rookies, 1989 Score Barry Sanders rookie, and all of the Shaquille O'Neal base rookie cards are the ones that stick out immediately for me. Card collecting really is a great hobby; you can do it any way that you want to do it, and there's truly something for everyone. On top of that, so many of my cards evoke a memory of where and when the card was obtained, especially if it was a pack-pulled card!
I still remember my first pack of cards: I was four, and told my grandma that I wanted to get some baseball cards. The next time I went to my grandma's house, she said she'd found some at the grocery store, and she handed me a cello pack of 1989 Topps baseball! The detail I remember is that I didn't get any Tigers. Not long after, I was at 7-11 with my dad, probably getting my usual Fritos and a Slurpee, and they had 1990-91 Pro Set hockey cards on the counter, and my dad grabbed two packs for me. I got a couple Red Wings, and I was hooked. After that, my dad and I collected together.
Shaq was the first player I ever collected; he's my favorite athlete. I was seven years old when I saw him pull down the backboard, the shot clock, and everything attached to them on a dunk, and I thought that was just the coolest, baddest darn thing I'd ever seen! I was hooked, and collected any Shaq card I could find.
Today, I have a personal vintage checklist that involves all four major sports, and I'll be trying to chip away at that for the next several years. The current players I tend to set aside are Mike Trout, Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Ronald Acuna Jr. in baseball, and Joe Burrow and Josh Allen in football, as well as assorted Panthers!
@PTPHockey: @DougPlagens #DearDoug Through Being Cool, From Under the Cork Tree, Tell All Your Friends, or Commit This to Memory?
This is a music question, and anyone who knows me knows that rock music is one of my favorite subjects of discussion (Preferably punk rock, ska, metal, hardcore, and their various sub-genres). The question being raised here involves four iconic albums: Saves The Day's Through Being Cool, Fall Out Boy's From Under The Cork Tree, Taking Back Sunday's Tell All Your Friends, and Motion City Soundtrack's Commit This To Memory. These are all classics in the pop-punk/emo realms.
If we're strictly talking about this list, they're all very enjoyable albums that have stood the test of time, but I'm ranking Through Being Cool at the top by a wide margin. Saves The Day helped drive a scene, and that album is an absolute classic. I also would bet that the other three bands on this list were Saves The Day fans before they started their bands! I could write pages about this question, but I'll save that for another time. Regarding Through Being Cool, choosing a favorite song is nearly impossible because, as I said, they're all classics. "Holly Hox, Forget Met Nots", "The Last Lie I Told", and "You Vandal" come to mind first, but it's a play-straight-through album. I'm glad that over the course of the 34 Vans Warped Tour dates I attended, I saw them perform multiple times. I loved Warped Tour so much; it really was "The best day ever", as they called it! For many years, it was one of the days around which the whole Doug Plagens calendar revolved.
As for the other albums: I'd actually go with Take This To Your Grave from FOB over From Under The Cork Tree… My favorite Fall Out Boy track ever is "Chicago is so Two Years Ago". Tell All Your Friends is full of classics… I want to karaoke "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" right now! However, I should wait on that 'til after the season… That could strain my voice! As for Motion City Soundtrack… that album is great, but I actually love its predecessor, I Am The Movie more!
Last thought… I'm throwing a few other classic albums from this realm into the pile with these that you've mentioned: Silverstein's Discovering the Waterfront; Story of the Year's Page Avenue; Hawthorne Heights' The Silence in Black & White; The Ataris' So Long Astoria, and Sugarcult's Start Static. What a playlist you could make out of this batch of albums!
As always, thanks everyone for the outstanding questions! This has been a ton of fun! Talk to you next week!
