Joe Bowen not being sent on the road to call Toronto Maple Leafs playoff games
When the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators faced off at the Canadian Tire Centre on Thursday night, it was a matchup that had been more than two decades in the making.
Playing the first two games of the series in Toronto at Scotiabank Arena, the Game 3 contest was the first playoff game between the two teams in Ottawa since 2004.
Next to Detroit and Buffalo, it’s the third-shortest trip for any opponent Toronto could play, with many fans making the journey to support their boys in blue and white.
Two people who weren’t there, however, were Joe Bowen and Jim Ralph, the team’s long-time play-by-play radio duo, as flagged by former Sportsnet employee Howard Berger.
As has often been the case in past years (and as it was during the regular season), Bowen and Ralph were calling the game via a TV monitor in a studio.
“The multi–billion–dollar communications behemoths could not scrape up enough petty cash for Bowen and Ralph to travel all the way to Ottawa. So, the veteran broadcast duo will again be forced to call Games 3 and 4 off a TV screen at the Sportsnet studio. What a complete travesty. There is cheap… then there is something like this, which doesn’t warrant an adjective,” Berger wrote in a blog post published on Thursday.
Bowen infamously flubbed a call in the 2023 playoffs when the Leafs beat the Tampa Bay Lightning in overtime of Game 6 in a first-round series, to advance to the second round for the first time since 2004.
“When the TV shot doesn’t show the Tavares celebration until well after the fact, it’s rather difficult to make the call off the TV monitor. By the initial celebration, it appeared Morgan Rielly had scored. My bad!” Bowen replied to a fan who criticized him for missing the call.
Bowen and Ralph did travel for the second round of the playoffs that year, perhaps influenced by the fan outcry after learning the broadcasts were done remotely.