Yo! Welcome into the House of L podcast. We are brought to you by Aurelio's Pizza. It's the sauce. I'm Lauren Tomes. Thanks so much for hanging out here with me today.

Today is one of those episodes where I feel like the podcast is built for because I actually enjoy talking hockey more than people would expect or think.

But I also know that there's stuff that we can and can't do a lot of without losing listenership. Before you get all upset, just understand that as popular as the Black Hawks have been overall, they still don't truly come close from what we see on sports radio.

This might be different from your favorite podcast or your favorite Hawks theme podcast. It's not true of the television ratings anymore. Obviously with the team being shitty.

They just have never moved the needle for sports radio, specifically score listeners. It's strange as it sounds as successful as the Hawks were in Camelot and Hawks Camelot.

Over the last decade, it never caught on. When we try, I remember Joe and I trying experiments on the nighttime show where we'd be like, okay, what if we did a Hawks round table and we did some of those.

And the Hawks round tables that we had, we would have Mitch, then we pinpoint the date, we promote the bejesus out of it. And those those specialty shows would do well.

Like we would do a round table. So we'll bring in Jay Zewoski, James Neville, our guest here, for example, and have them sit with us for an hour and talk about the Black Hawks. And it would do well.

But if we had a segment, let's say that I'm doing a bear segment. Let's let's say it's December.

Okay. And I'm doing a bear segment. And then I tease with, hey, we'll get back to the bears in a little bit. Next up, we're going to talk Black Hawks. We're going to talk about this four game win streak that the Black Hawks are on.

Okay. We check back and we will have actually lost listeners from us talking bears to us talking about the Black Hawks.

A lot of people feel like every team deserves equal coverage. And that's not quite true.

At least in the minds of program directors, the great thing about where all of this stands right now is if you really want Hawks coverage, there's a lot of good Hawks coverage in town.

And you can find it. And honestly, even from a listening standpoint, you can find like specific Hawks stuff. You can listen to Jay Zewoski now on CHGO. And I love that he's just kind of doing hockey stuff now.

He doesn't worry about anything else. He's not trying to produce shows and none of that stuff. He's just doing hockey.

Charlie Romeliotis and Pat Boyle are doing the Hawks talk podcast. There's great content there.

You can find it, but it's still very niche niche. I say niche.

And I know that that frustrates a lot of hockey fans and Black Hawks fans. I still truly believe that Black Hawks fans aren't actually hockey fans. They're Black Hawks fans, which is okay.

I just don't think when you look at the ratings for the Stanley Cup final, and I do every single year, you're not going to find Chicago as a top 10 market watching it unless Chicago is in it now Chicago is in it.

Yeah, we show up and show out and we put up great numbers. It's why for years, the Black Hawks were on NBC. I think they they would max out. I think the rule was like 20 times that you could end up on NBC or NBC sports network.

And the Black Hawks were always there. I say all of that to say that I really do enjoy talking hockey. And I think that these are dark, but interesting times for the Black Hawks as a franchise, which is why on Friday on the radio show.

We had James Navajo on because obviously like the the training of the Brinket and Doc. That's huge news. It the announcement that the white that the Black Hawks were rebuilding. It couldn't have been more loud and more clear that that's what they were doing.

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