Rail Cam Coming To NHL Rink Near You

Hey, we here at LCS enjoy $2 rail drinks at happy hour. A lot of them, actually.

So when we heard a rail cam was coming to the NHL, we got excited. All those years of practice were soon to pay off in a rail-drink contest to be broadcast on national TV.

But alas, our cheers subsided when we found out that the rail cam wouldn't focus on a drinking competition at center ice, but rather on the game itself.

A Chicago company has gone all Mr. Wizard on us and has created a camera that will ride along the top of the rink glass and capture NHL action from an entirely different perspective. It's sort of like the skycam used at NFL games. Or like that time we strapped Zippy the Wonder Chimp to a bunch of helium balloons and sent him off down the Parkway East toward the Squirrel Hill Tunnel in Pittsburgh with a camcorder. Good times. Good times.

So the new rail cam will make its debut in a regular season NHL game Monday when the Avs and Stars face off in Dallas. The game will be seen live on Versus. Well, at least by those who actually know where Versus is on their cable systems.

The company developing the high-tech wonder is Fletcher Chicago. They've got a fancy Web site here, but apparently no actual video of the product in action. Disappointing. I can find hours upon hours of idiots lip-syncing to the Backstreet Boys online, but I can't find an example of the rail cam. Lame.

After earlier attempts to strap Darren Pang to a rope and swing him back and forth to capture the action failed, Fletcher apparently abandoned the short goaltender theory and chose a new approach -- using robots (gasp!). A robotic camera will sit atop the glass on a monorail and will zip back and forth from one end of the rink to the other to follow the play.

That's just crazy. Next thing you'll tell me is that we can go to the moon. Seriously. Best of luck, Fletch. Let me know when your flying machine is ready...

The rail cam was tested twice last year -- once at an AHL game in Edmonton and again during the NCAA's Frozen Four championships in Columbus, OH-IO. We'll see how it goes. If it's anything like the NFL's cam that flies above the action, it should be cool. But it has to be able to make smooth transitions like the players do when going end-to-end. If it has herky-jerky starts and stops, well, it might make one nauseous.

Another consideration is how it looks to those in attendance at the games. I haven't been to an NFL game in a few years, so I'm not sure how much of a distraction that above-field camera is. But I reckon it isn't the most pleasant thing to see when watching the action. And hockey rinks already have netting up on both ends of the ice, so adding another level of distraction may be a bit much for some. But we'll see.

This whole technological wizardry got us thinking about one of the previous attempts to make the game more TV friendly -- FOX's glow puck!!

Ahh, who could ever forget the obvious attempt to dumb down the game for the least common denominator. A glowing puck that shoots off a tail of fire with every shot. What's not to love?

Well, it turned out there was a lot to despise. We at LCS Hockey ridiculed the darned thing as much as possible until they got rid of it. Here's just one example. A finely crafted piece, if I do say so myself...

For those of you youngins out there who don't remember the glowing puck, I found one example on YouTube -- that haven for all things illegally uploaded. Here's Owen Nolan pulling off the old point-and-score on The Flopinator in the 1997 All-Star Game.

Luckily, the world learned its lesson from FOX -- don't ever anger the game's hardcore fans in order to pander to those who don't give a damn in the first place. Let the game be played the way it was created, and the fans will come.

Added tweaks like the rail cam might enhance the action. And I hear there are some wicked cool cameras coming down the pipeline for NFL action in the next couple of years that will knock your socks off. But I'm sworn to secrecy on those.

So until then, enjoy the rail cam, enjoy the lame sound bites Versus provides when players don the mics during games, and, above all, just enjoy the action on the ice.

And if that's not enough, enjoy this:

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