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It's now something just over a week into the NHL season, and some three weeks prior to the start of the NBA's games that ostensibly count. Not that you could tell if you're a viewer of the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

Rumors persist that, like a jilted suitor, ESPN is treating hockey coverage like a necessary evil. Fully a third fewer games will be aired on the network this season due to television contract changes.

But what's inexcusable is the comprehensive brushoff the NHL is getting on ESPN's flagship, SportsCenter. In the week before the NHL season kicked off, SportsCenter viewers knew more about the dying brother of a retired, deceased, second-tier basketballer than about the prospective fortunes of any NHL club.

With the exhaustive-bordering-on-demented level of attention lavished on preseason baseball and football, the disparity is an affront to hockey fans.

Give the puckers equal face time with the hoopsters during their respective regular seasons - they play the same number of games, have the same number of teams, and play the same style of playoff structure, there is no reason to shun one and overexpose the other.

Hockey is a distant fourth in popularity, and it won't make up any ground without support. Sure the cognoscenti can glean what happens from a single highlight, but the fast movement, coupled with the diminutive puck, all but beg for multiple replays, or at least a slow-mo shot on the highlight show, instead of three different angles of a layup or 3-pointer (which, last time I checked, were really easy to see the first time, thanks).

ESPN, your mission used to be to show all the news in the world of sports. Enough with the petty spite against the NHL. Except for Sundays, it's the best thing you've got going once the boys of summer are done working one day in five or going one-for-three.