Puck the Media’s NHL Play-by-Play Man of the Decade… Jim Hughson
December 29, 2009 2 Comments
(Today, Puck the Media features my picks for various decade-ending awards. I hope you enjoy them.)
There came a certain time during this decade, and I can’t be sure of when it happened, but Jim Hughson simply became the best hockey announcer alive. Maybe it was Bob Cole’s descent into geriatric mediocrity. Perhaps it was Mike Emrick losing a step or to on his immaculate pipes. Or it could’ve been the lack of a real hotshot successor in either the U.S. or Canada to try and take the crown. Regardless, at some point, the hockey world decided Hughson was it, and there couldn’t be a better choice than Hockey Night in Canada’s lead play-by-play man.
Hughson, who called his first Stanley Cup Final on TV last season, has the immaculate vocal talents of ESPN baseball announcer Jon Miller, but with a style all his own, that is both different from Miller and any other hockey play-by-play man we’ve ever heard. It is difficult to explain. It’s smooth and calm, but also tense and excited. It’s careful and deliberate without being boring or tedious.
Hughson’s rise has been an interesting one. He started the decade as CTV Sportsnet’s (The Canadian VERSUS, I think would be a good description) lead play-by-play man, as well as calling Canucks games or Sportsnet Pacific. He eventually got the job as CBC’s #2 guy (The “West Coast” guy essecntially) and waited until the network was ready to reduce Bob Cole’s schedule enough to make Hughson Hockey Night’s first new lead voice since 1980. It’s something fans of the sport and the broadcast have long called for, and I’ve yet to see anyone disappointed with Hughson as the replacement.
Honorable Mentions: Mike Emrick (VERSUS/NBC/ABC/FSN New York/MSG Plus), John Forslund (VERSUS/FS Carolinas), Chris Cuthbert (TSN/CBC), Jack Edwards (NESN/VERSUS/ESPN/HDNet)
About stevelepore
Well, color me surprised. I thought you would choose Emrick since he’s your broadcasting idol (mine too). Seriously, Hughson is a great choice. I started listening to Hughson in 05-06 thanks to Comcast and Yahoo! streaming games online and when Versus used the CBC broadcast for some playoff games in Edmonton. I still listened to him through online feeds, even when Versus had their own broadcast.
Minor things: it’s no longer CTV Sportsnet (Rogers has owned the thing for quite sometime and the name has reflected it for a while; it’s CTV and TSN that are now under the same corporate umbrella) and I’d say that Sportsnet is more like Fox Sports than Versus, given that FSN and Sportsnet both have regional programming and, in theory at least, regionally-tailored sportscasts.