IN A RARITY, I caught myself watching a hockey game on TV. As a dedicated reader of Life. And Scoreboards, you know I’m not a sports fan, but my friend lives in Las Vegas, and I wanted to see how the Golden Knights were doing in the Stanley Cup Finals.
They lost, and the Carolina Hurricanes are the 2026 Stanley Cup Champs.
(Does that sound odd to you, by the way? Two ice hockey teams battling it out on the frozen tundras of Raleigh, North Carolina and the Las Vegas desert?)
Anyway, the losing effort at home reminded me of working games like that in my career. Those thoughts led me to a scoreboard secret I can share, fulfilling our overarching promise here at Life. And Scoreboards to give you behind-the-scenes stories you won’t likely hear anywhere else, this time in the form of scoreboard crowd-pumping philosophy.
You even get to feel what it’s like to be a scoreboard operator yourself.
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This scenario happens across all Competition, but we’ll stay with the NHL for our example.
When the home team is kicking ass, a scoreboard operator’s job is a piece of cake: sit back, toss a little joy into the arena to help celebrate, strut to victory along with the rest of the arena. Oh, and run those commercials.
Yeah, it’s easy to pump the crowd when the home team is winning. A monkey could do it — if the monkey understood how to use a computer running proprietary display software while communicating on a headset; knew how to manipulate the flow of audio as it passes through a $30,000 digital mixing console so 17,000 people won’t be blasted with bursts of deafening oscillation; could read a coded filename to determine which one of the 31 boards the animation file was made for and move it into the correct folder of one of the nine distinct scoreboard computers; ensure a sponsor that paid seven figures to the home team gets their content on the boards at the right time; and stuff like that.
But it can be a bitch when the home team is losing. That’s when a scoreboard operator needs to roll up their sleeves and get some energy into that building, into the fans, into the team.
Get ‘em back into the game.
But, c’mon. It’s hockey and we’re down by two goals in the 3rd period. There’s only 2 minutes left on the clock and there’s a timeout.
What are the odds of the home team overcoming a 2-goal deficit with just two minutes remaining on the clock? I always estimated that to be around 1-in-20. Our modern-day L.AS research team says there are no exact stats to track that but report the estimate is more like 1-in-100.
Ergo, the question is: Do we pump the crowd?
One-in-twenty/fifty/a hundred chance to win? We’ll look like idiots if we pump the crowd, thinking we can still win. We will look bush league.
Incorrect. That is amateur-scoreboard-operator-thinking.
In my professional opinion, giving up is bush league. Putting on jackets to leave when there’s still time on the clock is bush league.
I’ve always seen it this way:
There are 17,000 fans out there. Many are season ticket-holding, diehard fans who know it’s probably a lost cause, but that’s not the entire crowd.
There are kids out there too. This is the first hockey game ever for many of the people out there, young and old. Some don’t give a crap about the game at all and are there to have a good time with friends.
Like me, and all the pros on press level, most of the fans are thinking, We’re done for.
But they want to cheer.
But they don’t want to look stupid, or feel stupid when no one around them will cheer.
Bam—That’s where I come in.
I let the crowd know that it IS okay to cheer, even when it’s a long shot. They want to cheer. They don’t want to look dumb though. That’s why I fucking uncork it when there’s two minutes left!
Make them believe it’s still possible, even if just barely. Give them permission to cheer.
Here. I’ll start it for ya!
(These are actual files that ran on the old arena boards back when Joe Sakic, Peter Forsberg, and Milan Hejduk were on the ice.)
You’ve got to build up a library of “desperation content” so the crowd doesn’t get bored. There can be a lot of ref whistles (read: stoppage in play and a time to pump the crowd again) in the last two minutes.
Sometimes I even talk to the crowd:
You’re going to need that library when the game clock gets down to one minute. Now it’s even more dire. A whistle stops play. Quick — before anyone has time to think: Pump the crowd again!
Sometimes they score a goal. Now we’re down by only one!
In my mind, I’m tipping my hat to the team. Thanks! (It really helps when the team does something good.)
We fight until the clock reads 0:00.
But more often than not, there is no comeback and the game ends in a loss.
And now here’s the secret.
All those many, many times when they lose — nobody in the crowd ever remembers the shit you ran on the scoreboard.
As soon as they walk out the door, they’re thinking about the loss, perhaps losing a bet, what is their record now?, he should’ve checked that guy in the second period, who do they play next?, hopefully none of the injuries were serious, etc.
Nobody’s thinking about the fucking scoreboard.
On the flip side, however, when the home team does comeback, does tie it up, and then wins in OT, say, and you’ve been pumping them all along throughout the improbable third act, you look like a genius. A seer looking down over the frozen playfield with a crystal ball.
It may become part of the celebration: Even the people running the scoreboards knew they were gonna win!
I have worked over 4,000 sporting events and I’ve seen lots of comebacks like that. I’m sure those are the best games to watch. Those are also the best games to work.
So you see? There is no downside.
In the face of an almost no-win situation? Pump the crowd hard. When they lose as expected, everybody forgets the board. When they win, you’re a genius.
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JD, what about when it’s 3-0 with two minutes left?
Three to zero? Two minutes left?
Fuck that. You’re on your own then.
THE END_