It's Friday Night in Toronto and You're a Sports Fan ...

It's Friday April 1st and you're a sports fan in Toronto. What should you do this evening?


The Jays home opener is already sold out, and while they aren't officially eliminated from playoff contention, they should be by about 7:30pm.

You could catch the game on TV, but there's a better option.

You could go to the Toronto Rock game at 7:30pm at the Air Canada Centre.

Here's three reasons why this is a better use of your time:

1. The Rock have already guaranteed a playoff spot, with a quarter of the season left to play. Can any other Toronto team claim this? Not even close. Every other Toronto team will be watching the Rock in the playoffs.
2. With a successful two-win weekend the Rock can guarantee at least one home playoff game. What's better than watching a Rock home game? Cheering them on to a home win that gives them a chance to host a playoff game, which you'll also be able to watch (and is slightly more fun than a regular season game)!
3. The defending champs are in town for a rematch of last year's Champions Cup final. The Rock lost that game, and you know they want to win this one. The Stealth are a helluva team, so it's going to be a great game.

Sold? You should be. In addition to buying regular-priced tickets, there's three great ticket deals to take advantage of:

1. Playoff Push Pack (deal on seats and trinkets now, plus the option to buy playoff tickets)
2. Dinner (Jack Astor's) and Lower Bowl Seats
3. Dinner (Jack Astor's) and Upper Bowl Seats

Can't make it to the game?
You can catch it on TSN2, but not the NLL Livestream Feed. Remember, the Jays season will be in the books after the first pitch, so change the channel and watch some Toronto Rock!

Speaking of the Livestream Feed, last weekend the game against Calgary was a complete debacle. Like monumental screw up. TSN2 was going to cover the game on TV and it was going to be on Livestream. I don't have TSN2 or even digital TV. I'm living in the dark ages. HDTV doesn't impress me, so I'm in no hurry to drop money on it.

Anyway, enough with my Luddism and back to last week's disaster. I turned on my Livestream Feed so I could catch the game. I tuned in about 30 minutes early (what can I say, I love the Rock) and caught the announcer saying that they were going to cut the audio until after the national anthems. So I checked my email, grabbed a glass of water, went to the bathroom and got settled in. Audio came back and we got to watch the opening draw and the first 25 seconds before the screen went blank and the audio died and a message said 'not available at your location.' I started swearing like a sailor meeting his long-lost trucker-brother at the finals of the cursive competition (aka The Expletive Beeping Swear-off). I restarted the browser to see if something was messed up with Firefox. I swore. I restarted my computer, and I swore ... until I saw people in the Livestream chat saying the same thing. All of Canada was blacked out. I probably would've laughed if we'd been snowed out, but everyone under the age of 25 probably has no clue what that even means.

So yeah, memo to the Rock. Not all of us have TSN2. I know the technology isn't smart enough to figure out who does and doesn't have TSN2, but blacking out the Livestream Feed flat-out sucks for those of us who don't. Doing it 25 seconds into the game, because TSN2's coverage of the post-game of March Madness ran long, well that's even worse. I clicked around for another 30 minutes hoping Livestream would come back, and then gave up.

The only upside to how unpopular the Rock are? If you miss a game, you can watch the repeat a day or two later in the Livestream Archives, and you'll have no clue what the score was. You won't accidentally find out the score, because it's pretty easy to avoid the three places in the world that will actually report the results of the game.

Go Rock Go!