The Show Won’t Go On

Flipping through the channels tonight trying to find the Mighty Duck-King game? Good luck.

For the first time since the Ducks began playing 11 seasons ago, a Duck-King game won’t be on television, breaking a string of 56 televised games between the local rivals.

On an unusually busy Wednesday night, the Lakers and Seattle SuperSonics are on Fox Sports Net, and the UCLA-USC men’s basketball game is on Fox Sports Net 2. The other station that sometimes carries Duck home games, KCAL, will be showing “Hollywood Squares” when the puck drops tonight at the Arrowhead Pond.

The reasons have to do with a simple fact certain to infuriate local hockey loyalists: In the eyes of TV sports executives, hockey in Southern California stands toward the end of the line.

The Lakers are the Lakers, and UCLA-USC basketball happens only twice a year, leaving Kings-Ducks in the cold despite recent negotiations between the Ducks and KCAL to get the game on air. “There’s obviously a conflict with both of our broadcast partners,” Duck spokesman Alex Gilchrist said. “We as an organization made a decision to be loyal to our broadcast partners and not go elsewhere. It’s a rarity that something like this would happen. It’s disappointing.”

Or, as King Coach Andy Murray said: “Somebody made a mistake. I get no time to be disappointed about it or worry about it, I just think somebody made a mistake.”

Seventy King games will be aired on Fox Sports Net and Fox Sports Net 2, the most since the Kings’ 1992-93 Stanley Cup finals season, but the Ducks have a more complex TV package that primarily includes two broadcast partners, Fox Sports Net 2 and KCAL.

KCAL’s game plan is simple: Televise Duck home games on weekends and almost all Laker road games, whether weeknight or weekend. Typically, there are three to five Laker games per month that preempt or condense KCAL’s weeknight news coverage. KCAL runs “Hollywood Squares” every weeknight at 7:30, followed by news at 8, 9 and 10 p.m.

When the NHL schedule was released last summer, KCAL was granted first rights to 19 Duck games, as per its contract with the team, and selected its games only on weekends. Fox Sports Net 2 then picked 40 Duck games. Tonight’s game was not selected by either KCAL or Fox Sports Net 2.

A source familiar with the team’s TV coverage said Duck officials tried to get KCAL to pick up the game in recent weeks and even “sweetened the deal,” but KCAL officials declined.

Duck games average a 0.4 rating this season on KCAL, about 22,000 households, although KCAL said its decision to pass up tonight’s game is based less on ratings and more on the difficulty of making a late schedule change.

“It’s not so much a ratings issue; Ducks-Kings would do better than just about any [Duck] matchup we have,” KCAL spokesman Mike Nelson said. “It becomes a timing issue to add a game to our schedule on a couple weeks’ notice. If the game were on a weekend, when we wouldn’t be preempting our local news, it would be a different story. It’s very difficult to do a preemption on a weeknight and add a game.”

As for Fox Sports Net 2?

“You’ve got the Laker game and you’ve got USC-UCLA,” Fox Sports Net spokesman Dennis Johnson said. “There’s only two UCLA-USC games a year. Too many sporting events and not enough windows.”

In the end, hockey gets the short end of the stick.

“It’s strange in some respects,” Duck General Manager Bryan Murray said. “But I guess it will be an opportunity for L.A. and Anaheim fans who normally watch on TV to come to the game.”