ESPN TV Deal

[theohall]

Any thoughts on this?

Mine are it's good for the league and players, but bad for fans. Why? Current ESPN NHL coverage consists of ESPN+ regional broadcasts, an NHL show on ESPN+, using bots to write pre-game articles which miss chunks of relevant info (injury reports) and pulling AP articles for post-game coverage. That's it. With the amount ESPN already spends on the NBA, NFL, MLB, and college sports - even though they've spent a chunk of change for NHL Rights, how much more are they going to spend to promote the NHL? Now, they have to add in broadcasters for the 25 National games, plus their chunk of the playoffs. I will believe it when I see it when it comes to ESPN and how they've treated the NHL in the past - even when they had the TV deal. Heck, they were the only game in town in the mid-to-late 80s for NHL and even then they pushed everything else first.

The one big benefit I see for fans is playoff coverage where they can dedicate networks to each game, instead of the NBC jumping around channels thing when games over-lapped. But that's only going to be for "part" of the playoffs.

Thank goodness for NHL Network and I won't be surprised if they wind up with part of the TV deal.

[cprice12]

I'm not going to get too pessimistic about the whole thing until I see how ESPN actually handles it.
All of what you said are valid concerns.
Going to a network that absolutely doesn't give a shit about the NHL, is a cause for concern. But...it's cost prohibitive for the NHL to promote what they're paying a lot of money for.
If they promote the games, if they air the highlights on SportsCenter like they should instead of tossing them in as an afterthought, if they add NHL programming (NHL2Night...stuff like that)...and if they just give it the respect that fans want them to, it'll be fine. More eyes on games should be a good thing...but NHL fans have seen this movie before...and ESPN has disrespected the NHL for the last 20 years. Lots of people are excited, but also pretty skeptical. And rightfully so.
So we'll see.

[theohall]

Then there is this which was buried in the TNT NHL Deal announcement:

The NHL's out-of-market streaming package (NHL.TV) is also moving to ESPN+ as part of its subscription offerings.

So the only option for non-National or non-local broadcasts appears like it's going to be ESPN+ only. Haven't seen anything announced about "Center Ice", but NHL.TV has basically been the internet version of Center Ice. If you have a local team, you'll still have Bally Sports Midwest or whatever your local regional network is.

Just hope the NHL doesn't get buried coverage wise by these networks (TNT and ESPN) who have spent a crap ton more dollars to cover other sports (MLB, NFL, NBA, and NCAA). Usually money spent is what determines how much a network devotes to covering a sport, because they want to recover that investment.

NBC basically couldn't afford it anymore thanks to their NFL deal costing $2 billion.

[theohall]

Another example of why I'm very doubtful of ESPN magically improving their NHL coverage.

https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/314 ... remain-won

In the upcoming final days, we'll also be keeping an eye on the seeding races in all four divisions, as well as the battle for the Presidents' Trophy. This season's playoffs will be intradivisional for the first two rounds, then the final four teams will be re-bracketed based on their regular-season records. That means the final stretch of games is still meaningful even for the teams that already have clinched their divisions. As of Sunday, the Vegas Golden Knights hold an edge over the Hurricanes for the overall top spot, with two extra regulation wins thus far.

The paragraph above is from an article on 5/9 talking about playoff races. Note there is zero mention of Colorado. If the Avs win out, including a head-to-head with Vegas, the Avs win the President's Trophy. Avs old the RW tie-breaker over both Vegas and Carolina. You'd think it would at least be mentioned.

[theohall]

Thus far, streaming works but it's missing most of the features NHL.TV had - Being able to pick when to start a stream - like jump to beginning, jump to 2nd period, etc. If the game is live and you happen to have missed the beginning, but don't want to be spoiled, tough beans. The stream automatically jumps in wherever the game is currently. Only way to move around in the stream - Rewind and FastForward. No options to jump to goals, penalties, etc - like NHL.TV had. It's like we are back in the days when NHL.TV/CenterIce started streaming over a decade ago. WTF ESPN?? Is it too difficult to keep functionality that already existed? Or would that cost ESPN too much money?

Then there are the godawful lack of detail previews on ESPN's website, still.

Still trying to turn Buccigross into a play-by-play guy and he sucks at it. Don't care how much he loves the game. It doesn't make an analyst/tv host good at play-by-play. Almost as bad as NHL Network having Stephen Nelson, a former MLB analyst/tv host, do play-by-play who calls hockey as if it were a baseball game. There are plenty of hockey play-by-play men available. Just think of how many teams there are between the NHL, AHL, ECHL, and junior leagues. Too bad ESPN would rather promote it's talking head than pay someone who calls games professionally all the time, not just once a week or so.

TNT's 1st broadcast - brighter, crisper image; better ticker (doesn't take up as much space and includes shot counter); analysts were better... just better overall than the ESPN opening night broadcasts. And ESPN has the money to do more, they just won't spend it on hockey.

NOTHING has changed, as far as I can tell, other than ESPN is still trying to cheap out on covering the NHL, in spite of all the hype ignoring the above things.

[theohall]

In a shocking turn of events, ESPN magically decided to have Steve Levy do pbp for a ESPN Hockey Night game. Paired him with Messier and not so shockingly it is the best ESPN cast I've heard this season. Hopefully, they will be a primary crew for the playoffs.