Pat Flatley joins MSG studio

Three hockey-related news items for your day-before-opener reading pleasure:

1. Pat Flatley will succeed new Islanders game analyst Butch Goring as a studio analyst on MSG's "Hockey Night Live," effective Saturday. Flatley will work about half the HNL shows.

2. Cablevision - which owns Newsday - announced that all of Nassau Coliseum has been turned into a free Optimum WiFi wireless Internet zone - making it the largest Optimum WiFi hot spot on Long Island, just in time for Saturday's opener.

Better late than never, I suppose. I've been waiting for this service to be implemented since my first visit to the Coliseum in '73.

3. To celebrate the start of the hockey season, MSG will show the movie "The Rocket" at 7:30 p.m. Friday. It's a Canadian biography of Maurice Richard that was well received when it premiered.

But I have to be honest. I was disappointed when I saw it about a year ago. It's really, really slow moving. Worse than that, I made Mrs. WatchDog watch it with me.