The NHL on NBC

Even aside from the games, I thought NBC did a great job with the presentation aspects of the game, as everything looked and, for the most part, sounded sharp. How nice was it to hear Hockey Night in Canada castoff Chris Cuthbert calling the Dallas-Boston game? Cuthbert's one of the best hockey play-by-play men in the world, so it's nice to see he was picked up to call games here.

It was a little surreal to see TSN analyst Pierre McGuire crammed between the Detroit/Rangers benches in a little cube of space, and McGuire's interjections into the game crew's conversations were sometimes ill-timed. Three voices is perhaps one too many for a hockey broadcast considering how fast the game moves along, but it's nice to see broadcasters trying to innovate with their game presentation.

It's no Hockey Night in Canada, but what I saw today was certainly better than most of the American broadcasts I see on my NHL Centre Ice package. It's too bad NBC didn't start showing games from the beginning of the season.

The game was NBC's first under their new NHL contract, and though they did better than OLN by keeping things simpler, there were a couple of problems. We watched in HD, and there was one camera angle that was weird -- we're not sure if that camera was not HD, but those shots were grainy and made everyone within them look like they were just embalmed.

I enjoyed the NBC broadcast much more than the OLN versions, though I still prefer FSN. Bill Clement and Ray Ferraro were the studio crew, with Mark Messier joining them in the intermissions. Mike Emrick and John Davidson were in the booth but Pierre McGuire was between the benches and provided insights throughout the game. NBC kept track of the ice time of Brendan Shanahan and Jaromir Jagr, keeping a special clock under the scoreboard whenever either of the two were on the ice. I can't say I paid much attention to it, though.