Last weekend saw more than 200 countries and territories – spanning six continents – gear up for the return of the World Cup of Hockey. Stateside, ESPN saw its own reintroduction to the sport as the official carrier of the tournament as Team USA tumbled to Team Europe on Saturday. The two-week span sees ESPN supplementing the world feed of 31 cameras with additional views/angles as well as player and puck tracking technology that leverages Sportvision’s infrared tracking system while John Buccigross and Kevin Weekes rotate games with Steve Levy and Barry Melrose throughout tournament play and Linda Cohn and Adnan Virk host studio coverage.
Cynopsis Sports spoke with Mark Gross, ESPN SVP, Production and Remote Events, about hockey’s return to the ESPN family, building chemistry and the company’s approach to the sport.
Gross on hockey at ESPN: We’re thrilled to have hockey back. We have a lot of hockey fans here at the company who are really devoted to it. We’ve been excited to be back in the business. Working with the league and the NHLPA. Big picture, we want to do more than just document the games. We want to give people an idea of what the World Cup of Hockey is, the history behind it, the pageantry behind it, and how it is being treated in Toronto. So we wanted to cover the event and not just game-to-game, so it becomes one broadcast window with one team.
On new elements: While we are taking the world feed from Rogers Sportsnet, which is great at covering hockey, you are going to see “more” throughout the tournament: more angles, more looks purely from the camera coverage inside the arena. This is being treated like a Stanley Cup Playoff game. Some of the other things you will see include a better feel for who the players are and the stories behind the players for the audiences who aren’t used seeing hockey on our channel.
On chemistry: We’ve put together a team of talent who are obviously not used to working together because we don’t do much hockey. So our staples are the experts who have worked here for years in people like Levy, Cohn, Buccigross and Melrose, but we are excited to be able to add some incredible names to the mix as well such as Hall of Famers Brett Hull and Chris Chelios, to name just a couple. The early pretournament games were terrific for us in that they allowed us to work together for both the game and studios units.
On competition: We have been working hard pulling together vignettes and more to drive interest in the games. We aren’t naïve and know that we will be competing against football, baseball pennant races while hockey is suddenly showing up on our networks for the first time in over a decade. We have our work cut out for us and this is a good opportunity for us.
