The National Hockey League (NHL) is shown on national television in the United States and Canada. With 25 teams in the U.S. and seven in Canada, the NHL is the only one of the four major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada that maintains separate national broadcasters in each country, each producing separate telecasts of a slate of regular season games, playoff games, and the Stanley Cup Final.
With the prominence of Hockey Night in Canada since the 1950s, and with Canadian teams like the Edmonton Oilers and the Montreal Canadiens making multiple championship runs during the 1970s and 1980s, the Stanley Cup Final has regularly been produced and aired on broadcast television in Canada for decades. Meanwhile, American national coverage of the NHL evolved much slower than those of the other three leagues, and long-term coverage of the Stanley Cup Final remains on American cable television in some form with Turner Sports agreeing to air the series on TNT in 2023, 2025, and 2027.
Historical breakdown First broadcast As part of a series of experimental broadcasts that W2XBS (now NBC's flagship station, WNBC) produced between 1939 and 1940, the station broadcast a game between the New York Rangers and Montreal Canadiens from Madison Square Garden on February 25, 1940. Bill Allen provided the commentary. About 300 people in the New York City area saw the Rangers win, 6–2. Over the next few years, W2XBS (later WNBT) carried some New York Rangers home games on a local basis. A few New York Americans and Rangers games were on experimental TV stations in 1940-41 and 1941-42; then TV closed down until 1945-46.
Debut of Hockey Night in Canada
In the fall of 1951, in an attempt to determine whether it was a suitable medium for broadcasting hockey games, Conn Smythe watched special television feeds of Maple Leaf games. Television already had detractors within the NHL, especially Campbell who declared it "the greatest menace of the entertainment world". In 1952, even though only 10% of Canadians owned a television set, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) began televising games. On November 1, 1952, Hockey Night in Canada was first broadcast on television, with Foster Hewitt calling the action between the Leafs and Bruins at Maple Leaf Gardens. The broadcasts quickly became the highest-rated show on Canadian television. The broadcast came three weeks after Montreal radio host René Lecavalier presented a French-language telecast of the Montreal Canadiens' opener against Chicago, marking the beginning of La Soirée du hockey, which Radio-Canada, the French arm of the CBC, broadcast until 2004.
1950s
In the 1952–53 season, CBC began televising Hockey Night in Canada as a simulcast to the radio calls, joining the games in progress either 30 minutes or 60 minutes after the opening faceoff. Until 1961, the CBC was the only operating television network in Canada. Not only that, it was likely that not all Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens playoff games were televised in the early years, including to their local markets.
CBS first broadcast Saturday afternoon National Hockey League games for four seasons from to . Bud Palmer serving as the play-by-play announcer and Fred Cusick provided color commentary, pregame, and intermission interviews for the first three seasons. In , Cusick moved over to play-by-play while Brian McFarlane came in to do the color commentary, pregame, and intermission interviews. The pregame and intermission interviews were done on the ice, with the interviewer on skates. No playoff games were televised during this period, and all broadcasts took place in one of the four American arenas at the time.
CBS covered the 1956–57 season on Saturday afternoons, starting on January 5. For the next three years, CBS continued airing games on Saturday afternoons starting on November 2, 1957, October 18, 1958, and January 9, 1960.
1960s
CTV's involvement with the NHL began in the season with a series of Wednesday-night regular season games. These were produced by the McLaren ad agency, which also produced the Saturday night Hockey Night in Canada games for the CBC. As was the case with the Saturday games, they were contests (usually at home) of the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs, and after 1970, the Vancouver Canucks. CTV decided to pull out of midweek NHL coverage in 1975, opening the way for local TV stations in the three Canadian cities which had NHL clubs to carry mid-week telecasts of their hometown NHL clubs (also usually on Wednesday nights).
The regional issues that caused the NHL's previous American television deal with CBS to be terminated were settled by the league's pending addition of six new teams, which expanded the league's reach nationwide and into lucrative markets in Pennsylvania and California (in addition to two other midwestern markets; NBC, however, would lose the broadcast rights before the six new teams would make it to play). In 1966, NBC became the first television network in the United States to air a national broadcast of a Stanley Cup Playoff game, providing coverage of four Sunday afternoon playoff games during the postseason in color. On April 10 and April 17, NBC aired semi-final games between the Chicago Black Hawks and the Detroit Red Wings. On April 24 and May 1, NBC aired games one and four of the Stanley Cup Final between the Montreal Canadiens and Detroit Red Wings. Win Elliot served as the play-by-play man while Bill Mazer served as the color commentator for the games. Most notably, the CBC followed suit the next year. NBC's Stanley Cup coverage preempted a sports anthology series called NBC Sports in Action, hosted by Jim Simpson and Bill Cullen, who were between-periods co-hosts for the Stanley Cup broadcasts. To accommodate NBC coverage, game one of the 1966 Stanley Cup Final was shifted to a Sunday afternoon, marking the first time ever that a National Hockey League game was played on a Sunday afternoon in Montreal.
In the United States, the clinching game of the 1966 Stanley Cup Final on the evening of Thursday, May 5 aired on RKO General's stations, such as WOR-TV in New York City and WHCT in Hartford, Connecticut. Bob Wolff, who at the time did play-by-play for New York Rangers games seen on WOR, and Emile Francis provided commentary for RKO's coverage that night.
For six seasons, from through , CBS aired a game each week between mid-January until early-mid May in each of those seasons, mainly on a Sunday afternoon, including playoffs. Each American based franchise was paid US$100,000 annually for the first two years of the initial contract and $150,000 for the third. From 1968 to 1969 through 1971–72, the intermission studio was called "CBS Control," just like with its NFL coverage.
Due to prior programming commitments, CBS could not broadcast regular season games during the 1966–67 season, so that portion of the package was subleased to RKO General, which syndicated eight regular-season games to some cities, including the four U.S. cities that then had NHL clubs and the six U.S. cities that would gain new teams in the 1967 expansion. RKO General aired series of Sunday afternoon broadcasts at 4 p.m. Eastern Time during the last eight weeks of the regular season, starting on February 12, 1967. However, regular-season games were blacked out in the cities where they were played. For example, the March 26, 1967, game between the Boston Bruins and Montreal Canadiens in Boston was not televised on any station in the Boston area.Boston Globe, March 26, 1967, p. 37
1970s In , Hockey Night in Canada moved all playoff coverage from CBC to CTV to avoid conflict with the lengthy NABET strike against the CBC. Eventually, MacLaren Advertising, in conjunction with Molson Breweries and Imperial Oil/Esso, who actually owned the rights to Hockey Night in Canada (not CBC) decided to give the playoff telecast rights to CTV. Initially, it was on a game by game basis in the quarterfinals (game one of the Boston-Toronto series was seen on CFTO Toronto in full while other, but not all joined the game in progress. Game one of the New York Rangers-Montreal series was seen only on CFCF Montreal while game four not televised due to a lockout of technicians at the Montreal Forum), and then the full semi-finals and Stanley Cup Final. Because CTV did not have 100% penetration in Canada at this time, they asked CBC (who ultimately refused) to allow whatever one of their affiliates were the sole network in that market to show the playoffs. As a result, the 1972 Stanley Cup playoffs were not seen in some of the smaller Canadian markets unless said markets were close enough to the United States border to pick up the signal of a CBS affiliate that carried games one, four, or six (games two, three and five were not nationally broadcast in the United States).
After CBS lost the American television rights to NBC following the 1971–72 season (CBS was paying less than $2 million a year and NBC jumped to $5.3 million), the network covered the inaugural season of the World Hockey Association.
From –, NBC not only televised the Stanley Cup Finals (including a couple of games in prime time), but also weekly regular season games on Sunday afternoons (including select one regular season Friday night game in primetime). The previous contract with CBS was paying the NHL less than $2 million a year, and NBC jumped in with an offer of $5.3 million. Tim Ryan and Ted Lindsay (with Brian McFarlane as the intermission host) served as the commentators for NBC's NHL coverage during this period. Since most NHL teams still did not have players' names displayed on the backs of jerseys, NBC persuaded NHL commissioner Clarence Campbell to make teams put on players' names on NBC telecasts beginning with the season to help viewers identify them.
Peter Puck was introduced during NBC's NHL coverage in the 1970s. The animated character, whose cartoon adventures (produced by Hanna-Barbera) appeared on both NBC's Hockey Game of the Week and CBC's Hockey Night in Canada, explained hockey rules to the home viewing audience.
Besides Peter Puck, the 1970s version of The NHL on NBC had a between-periods feature titled Showdown. The concept of Showdown involved 20 of the NHL's greatest players (16 shooters and four goaltenders) going head-to-head in a taped penalty shot competition with Brian McFarlane hosting. After the NHL left NBC in 1975, Showdown continued to be seen on Hockey Night in Canada and local television broadcasts of U.S.-based NHL teams.
After being dropped by NBC after the season, the NHL had no national television contract in the United States. In response to this, the league put together a network of independent stations covering approximately 55% of the country.
Games typically aired on Monday nights (beginning at 8 p.m. ET) or Saturday afternoons. The package was offered to local stations with no rights fee. Profits would be derived from the advertising, which was about evenly split between the network and the local station. The Monday night games were often billed as The NHL Game of the Week. Viewers in New York City, Buffalo, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Los Angeles got the Game of the Week on a different channel than their local team's games. Therefore, whenever a team had a "home" game, the NHL Network aired the home team's broadcast rather than their own.
Initially, the Monday night package was marketed to ABC affiliates; the idea being that ABC carried Monday-night NFL football in the fall and (starting in May ) Monday-night Major League Baseball in the spring and summer, stations would want hockey to create a year-round Monday night sports block. But very few ABC stations picked up the package.
In most U.S. NHL cities, the Hughes NHL affiliate was the same one that aired the local team's games. About a couple of dozen other stations carried the games. The network had 47 stations for the season.