NHL
Darren links to news about Google showing full NHL games on their video service. I'm not sure how I feel about full video of old available on demand. The only game interesting to me, the 1992 regional final of the NCAA basketball tournament between Kentucky and Duke, the one with Christian Laettner's final shot, would bring back the memories of my 14 year-old Duke fan self running around upstairs screaming, getting my dad to come downstairs and watch the replays. Instead, I'd love to see what the CBC does after its doubleheaders on Hockey Night in Canada: show extended replays, multiple stretches lasting a minutes, of the important plays during a game. This way we see how they led up to a goal, huge save, or fight, instead of having to watch the pauses between faceoffs, plays that don't lead to anything, and so on. I've heard of a service that Major League Baseball offers that shows the last pitch over every batter, so that we skip through everything that leads up to a strike-out, home-run, ground out. There would be stuff that happens before the last pitch, such as a stolen base or a balk or a manager arguing with the ump that I think should get included.
In other words, I'll watch the full game when it's live, but after the game happens, I'm a busy man, so I just want the gist of it.
(If you're watching the video of Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs between the New York Rangers and Vancouver Canucks that Darren points to, be sure to watch the video of the aftermath in the city of the losing team afterwards.)
Joel Stein: “If hockey were a normal sport, a fight would get you ejected, suspended and fined. In the NFL, just being too happy about your touchdown costs you money. But the NHL, despite an influx of European players, is still a sport born of parts of Canada that most people don't own enough Gore-Tex to visit. It's full of mafioso laws about protection and honor. And while it would seem sensible for the NHL to eliminate fighting altogether, it can't. [...] The NHL is in the worst shape of its history, having suffered from overexpansion in the past decade. The game itself has been dulled by a suffocating defensive style of play. Fights and hard hits are all the sport has to promote itself with in the U.S., as it does in commercials and widely sold videos of fights set to music.”