Starting tonight, Canadians will be able to watch SmackDown on Wednesday nights, a whole day before our lovely but rowdy neighbours to the south. But why? Does this mean we’re taking steps to actually move into the future? Will we finally leave mullets and denim tuxedos in the past? Are you ready to accept your time-advanced perpetually frozen and extremely polite overlords?!
Okay, that may not be how time actually works, and I am Canadian enough to feel a teeny tiny need to apologize for the insinuation that wearing a denim jacket with jeans is anything but a totally killer look. But the fact remains that we’ll start getting SmackDown a whole day earlier, not because we lose service for scheduled maintenance on moose-infested cable towers like you’d assume, but rather the other most Canadian reason: hockey.
In Canada, the Televised Hockey Wars are the stuff of legends, and easily eclipse the Monday Night Wars in terms of ferocity and please and thank-yous. In fact, Rogers (the actual evil overlord in this conversation) spent over $5 billion CAD for a 12-year deal on NHL programming rights. As such, Thursdays on SmackDown’s home channel SN360 have have been designated for hockey, while the real sport of big boy panty fighting gets bumped to Wednesdays. It’s not quite recompense for airing Raw 15 minutes later than it did in the States, but it’s something.
This, of course, means that Main Event, NXT, and now SmackDown are all competing Wednesday night options for those with a penchant for WWE programming and a solid internet connection. This also means, of course, this is just a long-winded way for me to say hey, you, just watch NXT. I mean, it’s basically just Canada: The Wrestling at this point anyways, right?
