Friday night was bad for a lot of reasons. The Flyers lost a heartbreaker -- okay, bad enough. But before the game, while the entire continent was able to watch Rod Brind'Amour's No. 17 rise to the rafters, those of us in Philadelphia could not.
CSN Philly failed to air the ceremony at all, outside of a few highlights here and there throughout the game. Instead of the pre-game banner raising at 7 p.m., they showed a repeat of The Orange Line, which preceded Pre-Game Live at 7:30 p.m. Meanwhile, fans in Raleigh were treated to local coverage of the event on FS Carolinas while fans everywhere else on the continent could watch lie and uninterrupted on NHL Network.
Oh, but in Philadelphia? Black out.
You know, the point of a blackout is to prevent a national network from stealing viewers away from the local network. Fine, it makes sense most of the time. This blackout served no purpose. Shame, CSN.
Don't worry, though. I think I've been able to compile the entire ceremony, from start to finish, after the jump.
The ceremony started with a video feature, which the Carolina Hurricanes put up on their website. It includes quite a few of the awesome highlights from Brindy's Flyers career, which was a great touch.
Now, the next three portions of the ceremony aren't embeddable, but we have links via the FS Carolinas web site. They will all open in a new window.
Part 2: Brind'Amour is introduced, teams give him gifts.
Part 3: Brind'Amour speaks.
Part 4: The banner goes to the rafters.
And that's the ceremony. Hopefully this helped you get over CSN's screw-up the other night.