Morning Skate: Digital

Oct 4, 2022 - 10:00 AM

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Happy Tuesday, folks.

We continue our march toward the regular season, with Opening Night Eve a week from today. Don’t forget to leave stick tape and Gatorade out for Hockey Santa.

The B’s will be off today before things continue with tomorrow’s preseason match-up with the New York Rangers at Madison Square Garden, then the preseason will wrap up at home on Saturday.

Earlier in the preseason, we saw the Bruins reveal their first jersey ad sponsor, and our collective response was pretty much “OK, that’s fine.”

My guess is the collective response to this is going to be a bit more charged:

The league has dabbled with digital ads for a while now, whether on the glass behind each net or inside the blue line.

Most of us have been able to adjust, though the behind-the-net ones are still annoying.

These fully digital boards, however, could be pretty terrible, particularly if ads cycle in and out or feature motion while play is going on.

(To be clear, these ads will be digitally produced on the TV broadcast, not on the actual boards on the arena...for example, the players wouldn’t be seeing moving ads.)

I also wonder what the real life boards will look like: blank to make the digital projection easier, or will there be regular ads that can only be seen by fans at the arena?

It’s probably not worth it to get too annoyed by this until we see how it plays out, but it seems like something that has the potential to be way more annoying than jersey ads.

Today’s discussion topic

With the B’s heading there tomorrow, do you have any Madison Square Garden takes?

I’ve been once (before the most recent renovations) and thought it was a pretty cool experience to say you saw a game there, but that was about it...nothing special overall.