Huge news yesterday in the broadcast world. The NHL and NBC are breaking up. Fox will not be the secondary partner for the NHL, it will instead be Turner Sports. This is great news for a few different reasons.
The first is ditching NBC who did nothing, literally nothing, to advance the quality of their broadcasts or innovate in covering the sport. They did the absolute bare minimum and employ some of the worst and most boring personalities in the sport. Mike Milbury, Keith Jones, and Pierre McGuire, enough said. On top of that they would force feed these terrible personalities at the viewing audience well past the posted game time. They showed no respect to people. A 3PM game? Nah, watch this slop for 25 minutes first. It was outrageously bad.
Getting rid of NBC is huge. Must move away from the template:
— Jeremy White (@JeremyWGR) April 26, 2021
1. Highlight grit guy that works hard
2. Talk about leadership of a player on each team (often player in league for like a decade and isn’t unknown) and who will outleader today
3. Puck drop
A huge problem with the NBC deal is the NHL committed a lot of years to only one network instead of diversifying like all the other major sports. They also committed to the NBC deal right before sports rights blew up in value. So the NHL didn't get as much money and were married to one network for an extremely long time. I guarantee in hindsight they don't make the deal.
thats the B package, for 12.5% more than NBC pays for everything right now https://t.co/f5TeBBID5G
— 🦖 ryan lambert 🦕 (@twolinepass) April 26, 2021
The new deal the NHL struck is not only more valuable, but on more different networks. Turner sports produces one of the most entertaining and highly regarded studio show with Inside the NBA with Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kenny Smith. regardless of their personal takes the delivery is full of personality and engaging, unlike anything NBC has given over the years. I would expect Turner to try and duplicate a similar approach.
Here are some other details
Some of the highlights of the @NHL’s multi-year agreement with @WarnerMedia, which will see TNT crown a champion through its exclusive coverage of the Stanley Cup Final in three of seven years.
— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) April 27, 2021
Details: https://t.co/bIgIoeVWlq pic.twitter.com/EXGtGKF088
No longer will the NHL have to worry about if hotels have NBCSN. TNT and TBS are widely available with mostly every cable package in the country. It will be interesting to see if HBO Max will use some of their rights to produce some high quality original content for the league. Something NBC basically ignored. Also would love if the HBO simulcast was unedited and allowed for adult language.
For those worried about ESPN and/or Turner taking over the broadcast rights, why? It literally couldn't be worse than what NBC did. Both ESPN and Turner produce high quality sports broadcasts. There is no reason to believe they could possibly be worse than NBC.
This is a good deal for the NHL and I'm glad they Turner the corner.
Thanks for reading!