Following the most-watched regular season on cable in 22 years, the NHL is poised to return to NBC Sports’ platforms on Wednesday with a Blues/Blackhawks showdown at 8p to open the season’s broadcast slate. Ahead of the new season, NBC Sports Executive Producer Sam Flood spoke about expectations and plans for the league in a conference call as the company looks to continue to grow audiences for the sport.
Flood on this year’s NHL coverage: We’ve got some neat new ideas we’re going to roll into our coverage, starting with a thing we’re going to call Star Nights, where we’re going to take a player from each team and essentially follow them throughout the night. We’ll show them arriving at the building, where they’ll be the on ice interview for Pierre before the game begins, one player from each team. We’ll also roll in a feature about their background, where they played hockey as a kid, how they grew into a player, just get to know them and their family, so you have an understanding of that player.
On keeping score: And then one other add for this year is our post-game producers and talent now know their job is to show every goal every night, and we’ll have a clock that counts down how many goals have been scored and how many of those goals we’ve shown, and every one of those goals will be shown on the post-game show before we leave air. We think it’s a fabulous way to celebrate one of the most exciting aspects of hockey, which is goal scoring, and not to show that the goalies just let goals in. We will also every night have the top five saves as selected by our expert panel of Mark Bellotti, our producer.
On the World Cup of Hockey: I actually went up to the final game of the World Cup of Hockey, and it was a great scene up there. I thought Toronto did a fabulous job. It was fun being in the building, fun to watch hockey in that way. I think it’s not relatable to what happens on US hockey for the NHL. I think it’s a different event, different entity. I thought it was a fabulous effort by the league, and I think it is a different time of year to be showing up at the hockey tournament. So I’m glad there was more hockey out there for people to see.
