I'm just tired of HNIC giving us clowns instead of serious professional analysts. Ron McLean is a sentimentality-peddling hack whose gee-whiz style got tired years ago. Don Cherry is an elderly windbag who wallows in still more mindless sentimentalism and can't complete a sentence or finish a thought (if he has any, which he seldom does). Bob Cole? Yes, he is a legend who, in his prime, had an unparalleled sense of anticipation and excitement which used to make up for his technical failings; but at this stage he is a doddering geriatric who is so far behind the play he might as well be calling the game from the original Montreal Forum, and whose calls are so non-informative that they actually detract from our understanding of what's going on. Gary Galley has little to offer that warrants him holding such a plum seat; he's banality incarnate. Only in the second intermission, when the admirable Elliotte Friedman and the servicably capable Kelly Hrudey show up, do we get anything resembling insight; and even then the odious Kypreos has to be added to the mix just to make sure we all remember we are watching a program devoted to idiots. I simply do not understand how this FLAGSHIP program for the entire sport can be so riddled with mediocrity. It makes no sense at all.