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Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814
COVID has crushed that station.
They’ve never had the easiest time of it, post-Iggy. The fan base has never felt like it embraced this new group - between players not living up to expectations (Bennett) plateauing and sharply declining in their mid 20s (Monahan) or being perceived to perpetually have one foot out the door (Gaudreau/Tkachuk), the interest has always felt arms length at best.
Tough to run a radio station like that at the best of times - it can’t be cheap beaming 50,000 amps or whatever all day every day. There are only so many car dealerships to buy ad space.
If I think back to the golden years of the Fan, they had everything:
-killer morning show with Mike Richards - say what you will about him, he was funny. And funny enough to have his bits replayed during the day as commercials.
-prime time US syndicated show - Rome. Not gonna have another Rome fight, but 10-1 works best with a big American name - it just does.
-Afternoons with Joe Sports (RIP) and Rob Kerr - Rob was a community historian. He had a real great sense of what made moments special, even if he couldn’t capture them as a PBP man.
All of it anchored by a Hall of Fame PBP man, Peter Maher.
The single biggest mistake of Kirsch’s tenure was replacing Maher with Derek Wills.
We live in the age of “nothing matters”, where quality is secondary to affordability, where keeping your job takes precedence over being great at it.
Here’s the difference between Wills and Maher: I would listen to Peter read a phone book. Derek calls the game like he’s reading one.
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A couple things to keep in mind, Mike Richards ditched the fan with little to no notice and took off in the middle of the night sort of speak to Toronto to the next shiny new thing and that was to help kick off the new TSN radio 1050 in Toronto. He admitted as much years later after they turfed him at TSN, he was apologetic and then the Fan960 was kind enough to give him a afternoon segment back once a week with Rob Kerr where he would come on and talk about a variety of things in the sporting or non sporting world.
Maher retiring sucked but not sure what other options may have been out there I guess. Kirsch or the Fan network went with Wills, it is what it is I guess. I personally try not to let the commentator ruin what is the most important and that is the happenings on the ice where it really matters.
I hear you about the afternoon show, loved Joe Sports, he did tend to fill a lot of time at times by taking phone calls but he loved interacting with fans but....you can't go on a speech like yours without mentioning Pat Steinberg. He has at times carried that entire station on his back. He has done it all, him and Ryan Leslie were an awesome 1 / 2 when they worked together and Nault used to run the board (less Nault was better than what we are stuck with today) but after Rob left recruiting Leslie back to Calgary to be near his girls and away from the desk at Sportsnet was a huge catch for Kirsch. This was around 2014, I believe a tight budget ran him off the air but he quickly & fortunately re-surfaced when Roger Millions job opened up on TV.