June is a great time to be an American sports fan.
Major League Baseball action has heated up, the Miami Heat and Lebron James earned a stunning seven-game victory over the San Antonio Spurs, and just last night, Chicago won the Stanley Cup in thrilling fashion.
With what seems like a must-win sports game every night, no media enterprise has dominated the 24-hour sports news cycle like ESPN and their flagship program SportsCenter.
From the diamond to the gridiron, SportsCenter at its best gives fans the scores, storylines and amazing plays from around the sports world in one condensed hour.
Sportscenter is a cornerstone of American sports' culture. With iconic intro music that is etched into the core of every American sports fan, SportsCenter's "Top 10" segment , which highlights the ten best sports plays in the world each day, has been revered by fans like myself and name-dropped by announcers and athletes who dream of landing on the number one play.
Yet despite being the self-proclaimed "worldwide leader in sports," ESPN has frustrated me more and more recently.
Instead of actual sports events shaping ESPN's shows, it appears as if the network now drives the content.
What do I mean by that? I mean that ESPN has created a standard of obsessing over a few storylines at the expense of other, equally relevant ones.
The clearest divide occurs during the winter with the highly unequal balance of coverage given to the NBA compared to the NHL. Though NBA has significantly better TV ratings, Stanley Cup Final tickets are being sold for 50 percent more on average than tickets to the NBA finals, proving that a market for the NHL exists.
As a converted hockey fan, I was frustrated last Saturday afternoon when, on the eve of the Stanley Cup Final's pivotal game five matchup, the top story on the ESPN website focused on a soccer match between Brazil and Italy in the Confederations Cup.
You can argue that the NBA is more popular than the NHL, but it would be tough to convince me that more Americans care about Brazil's group stage victory than the upcoming clash of Original Six hockey powerhouses.
The optimist in me wants to excuse these decisions on the network attempting to remain relevant in a global world.
However, the cynic notes that ESPN has lucrative deals to broadcast NBA, NFL and Confederations Cup games, so it could be to their financial benefit to increase the coverage and excitement around these sports. ESPN's past coverage of LeBron James' or quarterback Tim Tebow's personal exploits only strengthens this argument. Where it seems that ESPN is failing, to me, is on the lack of full coverage, instead strongly focusing on core events that feed their interests.
I am not the only one to notice this discrepancy. Deadspin discovered that last season, during an average midwinter stretch, SportsCenter devoted more time (16.75 minutes) to the MLB offseason, than to the NHL (13.5 minutes), which was in the middle of its season.
I'm not here to convince you of why hockey is such a great sport (that's for another column), but I think it's reasonable to give it more airtime than a sport that has been over for three months.
This is not to say that ESPN is intentionally deceiving viewers. Rather, the reality of sports business seems to have eliminated the idyllic view of what SportsCenter should be.
Fortunately, the sports media landscape is undergoing rapid change, potentially signaling the start of a shift away from ESPN.
NBC finally transformed the Versus Network into the NBC Sports Network, which has subsequently gained steam through exclusive coverage of the NHL playoffs, a new deal to broadcast English Premier League games in the U.S., and exclusive rights to the Olympic Games.
Fox is also joining the fray, launching Fox Sports One in August. The network will star the UEFA Champions League, NASCAR and Major League Baseball, among other sports.
SportsCenter itself, once seen as the epitome of sports television, is finally coming under competition thanks to these new networks that each offer a signature show with a similar format.
Fox is mounting the most serious challenge to ESPN's dominance, hiring an internet-famous duo of former TSN anchors, Jay Onrait and Dan O'Toole, and former tennis star Andy Roddick to host Fox Sports Live. Regis Philbin will host the early evening show "Crowd Goes Wild."
While I can't blame ESPN for playing to its strengths and TV deals, I can only hope that these changes shake up the sports media world and renew the spirit of well-rounded coverage instead of further specializing sports television.