VERSUS College Hockey Deal Gets Closer For Friday/Saturday Night Games From Every Conference
August 5, 2011 6 Comments
From College Hockey News:
Versus, the television network owned by Comcast, is closing in on multiple agreements to air college hockey games this season.
Versus, which is soon re-branding itself as NBC Sports Network, has already been home to the NHL for the past six seasons.
The Versus package will not be a national deal, per se. It was not negotiated with College Hockey Inc. or the Hockey Commissioners Association. That is impossible given all of the deals confererences have separate Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) and teams have with other local channels.
But Versus is intending to reach agreement with all five current Division I leagues to air games on Friday or Saturday nights. Some of those deals have already been finalized. Versus is expected to make an announcement of its broadcast package once all of the deals have been completed.
Puck The Media 
That’s great news to get it on Versus, soon to become NBC Sports Network in January 2012. Then after that, we get the NFL Thursday Night Football Rights and IndyCar Rights with the Indianapolis 500 coming to NBC in 2013.
I wonder if NBC Sports Group won’t try for the NCAA Hockey Tournament, too. I imagine that those rights were included when ESPN obtained the rights to the Women’s BB Tourney, College World Series, &c. Maybe move the Frozen Four to Friday night, with the Final on Sunday afternoon on NBC. Just spit-balling here.
Completely off-topic, but somebody’s been steadily adding tables of historical Canadian NHL playoff announcers to Wikipedia.
Here’s an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NHL_on_TSN_commentating_crews
Neat to see some of the teams and assignments. I don’t remember ever seeing any announcers on TSN in the 90s besides Romanuk & Green (though to be fair, I probably had to go to bed before west coast games started), much less a secondary crew including Dan Shulman.
Shulman works for TSN again. I’d love to hear him call a few hockey games. Big fan of him on baseball.
Whenever I’ve heard Shulman talk about his hockey PBP ability (in radio interviews and whatnot), he’s always claimed he was horrible at it.
And since ESPN Classic Canada occasionally replays a World Hockey Championship final where TSN sent Darren Dutchyshen of all people over to Europe to do play-by-play, it seems in that era TSN was a little thin on talent and almost anyone could call a hockey game.
Interesting to look at – John Wells was their first NHL play by play guy (not listed) and Barry Melrose is not one of their analysts.