Western Alienation

I don't know if this is a one-time thing or is going to be a regular occurrence, but I see that Jim Hughson was doing the early (Leafs) game on Hockey Night in Canada while Bob Cole was doing the late game. I guess the idea would be that because Cole is over the hill, they need someone better for the important game, so they can dump him onto the smaller Western audience. If this is a regular thing, it won't win the CBC any new admirers out West, that's for sure.

And to make matters worse, the league office (in Toronto) made perhaps the worst call I've seen all season, ruling that Naslund made a deliberate kicking motion at a puck which he obviously never even saw. A bad enough decision on it's own, but combined with the decision a few weeks back to let a Wild goal against the Canucks stand even though the player clearly did deliberately move his skate forward a tiny bit to put the puck in the net (and in both cases overruling the referees on the ice), it's especially putrid.

The longer I live out West, the more I realize all the little, seemingly trivial/irrelevant irritations which could build up into annoyance with Central Canada (a.k.a. 'Easterners').