NBC Ends Innovative Run With NHL

NBC’s coverage of the NHL was supposed to begin in January 2005, but the cancellation of that season due to a lockout pushed its first game back a year. Its run came to an end last week when the Tampa Bay Lightning closed out the Stanley Cup Final by beating the Montreal Canadiens. The initial multi-year deals with NBC and OLN were followed by extensions with options and then a 10-year, $2 billion media rights agreement in 2011 with games airing across NBC and NBC Sports Network. Beginning next season, NHL media rights shift to Disney/ESPN and Turner Sports as part of separate seven-year deals that collectively add up to an average annual value of $625 million.

According to Mark J Burns at SportsBusiness Journal, the 16 seasons that NBC and the NHL were together were marked by constant innovations. The first and most notable came when Flood had the idea of putting an analyst “Inside the Glass” between both player benches to gain an ice-level perspective and relay information to fans that would be harder to obtain from high atop an arena in a broadcast booth. Kenny Albert, who replaced the legendary Doc Emrick this year as the network’s lead play-by-play announcer, said the idea has “led to about 50 jobs around the league.”

More recently, in late February’s two-game outdoor hockey event at Lake Tahoe, NBC leveraged live drone coverage for the first time during a NHL broadcast as two machines traveled up to 70 miles per hour, with the Sierra Nevada mountain range providing a beautiful backdrop.

“This was a real spirit of partnership and innovation that was born into the relationship from the beginning,” said John Collins, who served as NHL chief operating officer from 2008 to 2015. “The team at NBC and the league was really given almost a blank canvas to reimagine the way you present the sport.”

The network’s long run included helping start the Winter Classic, which it aired 12 times, and the Stadium Series (11 times). The 2013 Stanley Cup Final, won by the Chicago Blackhawks over the Boston Bruins, set an NHL record by averaging 5.8 million TV-only viewers across six games. And as streaming became part of the landscape, Game 7 of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final, won by the St. Louis Blues and shown on NBC, had a total audience of almost 9 million, making it the most-watched NHL game on record.