Come on NHL, Have You Learned *Anything* at All?

The Stadium Series game at Levi’s Stadium is tonight! Sharks! Kings! Bright lights! White pants! Excitement all around!

Much like last year’s Ducks-Kings affair at iconic Dodger Stadium, the NHL has set up a high-quality sheet of ice on a relatively warm night in California — this is, of course, amazing that they’re able to do this so consistently at this point, even/especially in warm weather markets.

So let’s celebrate! It’s a California-based event, and last year LA had KISS on hand, which led to one of my favorite pictures ever:

I seriously almost put this in a frame and hung it on my wall at work

 

So the floor is yours, NHL: it’s an otherwise unremarkable night in the sports world, so let’s really kick things up and impress people with a cool music show! Who’d you get this year? Someone hip and cool, right? Someone that screams California energy, no doubt. Someone like…

Wait…what? No, hold on.

Hold on.

This can’t be right. This just…this just can’t be right?

You got…Melissa Etheridge and John Fogerty? To play music? At the game??

I just…I just don’t know what to do with you anymore, NHL. And the game, as I type this, is being kicked off with music from some American Idol contestant named Chris Kris Allen? At least he’s got the windswept hair and leather jacket I might have expected from someone cool, and it looks like he’s got an orchestra behind him. This is actually extremely cool work, NHL. It’s almost enough to make me look silly for writing a thing lambasting your marketing/pr departments, until you go back and consider that MELISSA ETHERIDGE AND JOHN FOGERTY ARE GONNA PLAY LATER.

Melissa Etheridge is 53 years old. John Fogerty is 69 — he was borh the year WWII ended, for fuck’s sake. Kris Allen is 29, which I think makes him the youngest performer at any NHL event ever by roughly 60 years. I mean, I know this isn’t the Super Bowl and you’re never gonna get a Katy Perry-level spectacle, but come on. Were Imagine Dragons busy? I bet Metric would do it, seeing as how they did that Heritage Classic a few years back. I’m just saying there are options, guys.

Hell, just get everything from Katy Perry’s show except for Katy Perry herself. (Was this just a flimsy excuse to post my favorite GIF ever? You decide!)

I guess what I’m saying is: go Sharks?