In Lou We Trust

For Steve Lepore, Kukla Korner's Eye on the Media, today is a big day. The national TV schedules have been announced for the upcoming 2008-2009 season. Under the links, I'll note what games the Devils are in:

Three at home, three on the road. Interesting that the only west coast game on Versus will be at St. Louis. I don't think we will see Cam Janssen there, and even if we did, it will probably not have much an affect on the game. Two games against Our Hated Rivals, though, get billing.

TSN will feature 3 Devils games, predictably all against Canadian teams. Predictable because TSN is making a big deal about having all the Canadian coverage. Anyway, you can blame TSN for moving what would likely have been a 7 PM game 30 minutes later when you're waiting for a train at Newark-Penn. Lastly, a 5 PM game. Seriously, you guys.

CBC Hockey Night in Canada
No Devils games. Booo. Fun fact: CBC's HNIC only has 2 games this season where both teams are based in America: The season opening Rangers vs. Tampa Bay on October 4 in Prague and the 2009 Winter Classic between Detroit and Chicago.

NBC Hockey (from NHL.com)
Only 2 games are guaranteed, the Winter Classic and Rangers @ Pittsburgh at 12:30 PM on January 18, 2009. The other 8 games are on a flex schedule, so let's hope for some awesome Devils hockey so they can get some more national coverage.

Basically, the Devils do get some serious face time on Versus and it's nice that TSN has different games than the Versus' lineup. So that's 9 out of 82 games where the Devils are guaranteed a larger than local potential TV audience. It's not as big as Our Hated Rivals, who have eight on Versus, at least one on NBC, three on TSN, and three more games on CBC's HNIC in addition to the NHL season opener in Prague. But nine games isn't anything to sneeze at, and when CBC adds more regional games and NBC reveals their flex schedule, the Devils should have a few more games in that regard.