A review of 'Frozen Frenzy' — the NHL's answer to NFL RedZone

If you're an NHL fan, the concept of "Frozen Frenzy" is undoubtedly appealing.

Getting a chance to dedicate a night to keeping tabs on all the best action around the league the way NFL fans get to enjoy football each Sunday is a beautiful idea.

Unfortunately, trying to reproduce the near-perfect entertainment product that is NFL RedZone was never going to happen for the NHL. That has nothing to do with the quality of the sports involved, but rather how they're structured.

With football it's easy to pinpoint which moments are going to be exciting in advance. With a flow sport like hockey, that's far more difficult to do.

RedZone also has the benefit of polished and minimalist host Scott Hanson — who understands his assignment to a tee — as well as a firm no-advertisement policy.

Without those ingredients, Frozen Frenzy never had a chance to live up to its NFL equivalent. But it's worth asking if it held up on its own merits.

What worked

ESPN Analysts Kevin Weekes and John Buccigross brought plenty of energy to the proceedings, giving a convincing impression that they were excited about the action — and the viewer should be too.

The pair also provided some solid context before dropping in to games at times, although that was inconsistent (more on that in the next section). Both hosts provided good information throughout the night, particularly for fans who might've been following their own teams more closely than the league as a whole.

There were a few moments that felt made for the format such as a tense ending in the game between the Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators with Ottawa down a goal on the power play. It was the type of thing a fan locked in on their local team could easily miss.

As it happened, the Senators bungled the opportunity in short order, but it had the kind of building suspense Frozen Frenzy was trying to replicate from RedZone when that program cuts in with a team in a goal-to-go situation. The broadcast was too quick to jump between games at times, but tended to respect empty-net rally attempts, which was a relief.

There were also a few additional bells-and-whistles that made the broadcast feel like an event, from a tracker of the NHL goals record in a single day to the check-in with NHL senior vice president of hockey operations Kris King talking about the chaos the event caused in the league's situation room.

What didn't work

The biggest issue with Frozen Frenzy was that it didn't feel particularly coherent.

At times Weekes and Buccigross would bring the viewers into games while saying very little — presumably not to spoil the play to come. Sometimes they would provide information that felt disconnected from the on-ice action — such as a discussion about Carolina Hurricanes defenseman Bradj Skejei's contract season.

The inconsistency sometimes made it difficult for the viewer to know whether they were watching live action or an upcoming highlight. There was also wild variance in whether Weekes and Buccigross were throwing to the local broadcasts or talking about the action on the ice. That made it tough to know what to expect on a minute-to-minute basis.

When there wasn't a highlight coming, the broadcast had a quick trigger finger in terms of switching games. Live action didn't tend to last much more than a minute or two if nothing specific had happened, leaving little opportunity to get a sense for the action in any given game.

Some situations that seemed likely to keep Frozen Frenzy locked on a particular game weren't guaranteed to do so, either. At one point the broadcast cut away immediately after the Tampa Bay Lightning got a power play even though there wasn't a specific attention-demanding situation elsewhere.

Overall it would've seemed logical to show full power plays, particularly those given to teams that deploy plenty of stars with the man advantage.

Going to a studio panel featuring P.K. Subban and Mark Messier wasn't particularly informative or entertaining, and made Frozen Frenzy feel more like a traditional hockey broadcast with an intermission show.

The studio seemed overused in general. What made the event special was supposed to be the massive deluge of hockey, and yet there were quite a few times when at least five games were going on and the audience was watching analysts discussing the night's contests.

Unfortunately, multi-boxes don't work particularly well for hockey as it gets difficult to follow the puck with only part of the screen used. Any time more than one game was being shown the broadcast was clearly chasing the magic of RedZone's Octobox, but there simply isn't an NHL equivalent.

What's the takeaway?

Frozen Frenzy was not a disaster, and there was undoubtedly some fun to be had watching it.

That said, going in there were valid concerns about how it would be organized coming in and most of those concerns were validated. How well the duo of Weekes and Buccigross did is up for debate, but it's probably safe to say their performance didn't elevate the experience above its disjointed structure.

Ultimately it was simply too difficult to keep a through-line of what was going on in so many games at once while catching mere snippets of them — at least until later in the night when the schedule thinned out. As a result, the experience generally devolved into either watching highlights or catching extremely small sections of live games that weren't especially suspenseful or exciting.

While power plays offered some opportunities to catch live action that seemed likely to be exciting, during 5v5 play it felt like the decision of how long to linger on any given game was haphazard.

Frozen Frenzy isn't necessarily an idea that can't be executed well, but it isn't a slam dunk, either.

Unfortunately for the NHL, the first attempt on Tuesday was on the clunky side.