InkBlog

As he reflected Monday afternoon following his first season as the lead play-by-play voice for ESPN/ABC’s NHL coverage, a nearly nine-month journey that started in the same city (Tampa) that it finished, Sean McDonough thought about speed. What he learned very quickly calling the NHL in 2022 versus broadcasting the NHL in the 1990s and early 2000s was how fast the league had become. McDonough told himself all season: Pick up the pace of your calls.

Advertisement

“The season for us began Oct. 12 in Tampa, and one of the things that stood out to me immediately is the game is a lot faster than it was 17 or 18 years ago, which was the last time I was doing the NHL,” McDonough said. “Some of that are the rules changes that have opened the game up, but a lot of it, just like in other sports, are the players are bigger, faster, stronger. That took a little getting used to. You used to be able to put your head down and look for a note or if you weren’t quite sure of what number a player was, you could look down and the guy was probably still lugging the puck through the neutral zone. You don’t have time to do any of that now. If you don’t show up to the game having all the names and numbers completely memorized and you have to look down, you’re in trouble because the puck is going to go somewhere else very quickly, and it may wind up in the net while you’re looking down. I have an appreciation for how good hockey broadcasters are because it’s not easy.”

Speaking to McDonough 12 hours after the victorious Colorado Avalanche were skating around Amalie Arena, I asked him how he would evaluate his season in the booth.

“I thought I got better as the season went along,” he said. “I felt good about it. The game has changed a lot. As much as I followed as a fan in the interim, it’s different between following the sport as a fan and following it as somebody doing a regular national broadcast. So, a lot of it was getting up to speed, familiarizing myself with the players, the coaches, just learning your way around. For many of these arenas, I had never been in the broadcast booth. I was frustrated at the beginning of the season because our schedule was very sporadic. I was doing a game every three weeks or so. And you’re working with new people. I had never worked with (analyst) Ray Ferraro or (reporter) Emily Kaplan. I had worked with our producer and director before but never on hockey. So you’re trying to adjust to the speed of the sport, having not done it in a long time, to re-familiarizing yourself with the league to working with people you have not worked with before to doing a game every three weeks or so. I thought we all got better as a group as the season went along and by the time the playoffs rolled around, I was really comfortable.”

McDonough said he typically does not self-analyze his broadcast work, but he did during the NHL playoffs. He watched a lot of tape of his broadcasts. He said one of the adjustments he had to make this season was interacting with Ferraro from a different position as Ferraro began calling games from ice level. Also, most of McDonough’s broadcast booth positions were very high — often higher than the highest patron seats in an arena — than he dealt with in other sports.

Advertisement

“When you watch it back there are things you realize that are good and there are things where you say, why did I say that or I should do more of this or less of that. I don’t really like re-watching myself because I think I’m hard on myself,” McDonough said. “I think most men and women who do this for a living are hard on themselves. Sometimes I’m watching the tape and I think, oh, god, here comes the part where I told a story that was not well-timed or said an opinion I wished I hadn’t expressed. But no one’s ever pitched a perfect game in this racket. Maybe Vin Scully, but I even doubt that he’s done it.”

The Cup-clinching game highlighted that McDonough, Ferraro and Kaplan have found nice chemistry. (McDonough repeatedly praised both when I spoke to him.) I used to write that nobody does frantic like former NBC play-by-play voice Mike Emrick — the greatest of U.S. NHL game-callers — and McDonough does not do frantic close to the way Emrick can. I would expect McDonough to call games next season with even more pace and for ESPN writ large to improve because all smart networks use findings from their debut season to improve the product.

“I grew up loving hockey and I really enjoy doing it,” McDonough said. “It was really the first thing I did when I got out of Syracuse University and started at NESN (New England Sports Network). My first assignment was college hockey, and I did a lot of NHL back in the day. I was hoping that we’d get it back. I’ve told this story before, but I was in the stands at the TD Garden in 2019 watching the Bruins play the Blues in Game 7. I looked over where Mike Emrick was and said to my buddies, ‘Boy, it would be great to do this someday. The atmosphere is just incredible.’ That certainly was still the case three years later. Every building we were in throughout the playoffs was electric and that’s a big part of what makes the Stanley Cup playoffs special. The reality lived up to the anticipation.”

McDonough said he expects to be back in the same lead position next year, and I’d be surprised if that was not the case as well.

“I assume I’ll be doing it again — no one has said otherwise,” McDonough said. “All the feedback that I’ve gotten from my bosses has been extremely positive, so I don’t have any reason to believe that I won’t, and I haven’t heard any speculation that other members of the crew won’t be back too.”

Additional Stanley Cup notes:

• ABC’s Kevin Weekes conducted an excellent postgame interview with Lightning coach Jon Cooper. It’s usually a fool’s errand to predict any current player or coach as a can’t-miss broadcasting prospect, but having watched Cooper for years, having interviewed him a couple of times myself, I would rate Cooper as a can’t-miss studio analyst if he ever decided to go that route. He’s a thoughtful, compelling, media-savvy, championship-winning coach, and it would translate big-time for a network.

Advertisement

• If you are an NHL fan, you have to appreciate how long ESPN dedicated to Stanley Cup postgame coverage on ABC. The game ended at 10:49 p.m. ET and coverage on ABC continued until 11:43 p.m. That’s a 53-minute clip with one commercial. The shallow-depth-of-field cameras that have become a staple of big event sports productions really provided viewers with incredible close-up looks at players carrying the Stanley Cup.

• McDonough said since mid-May he had slept in his own bed for just two nights. He also tested positive for COVID during the postseason. “It’s an all-encompassing job, but adrenaline is real and so is the reality of how blessed you are to be doing (it), so you find another gear,” he said. “It’s an endurance test as much as anything else.”

• Kudos to producer Jeff Dufine and director Doug Holmes. The production of Game 6 was very good.

• I thought studio host Steve Levy did a great job navigating the Game 6 postgame. He gave analysts Mark Messier and Chris Chelios seamless entry points to offer commentary and controlled the pace of the postgame. A thought: Barry Trotz would be an interesting name for ESPN/ABC to add to next year’s studio rotation.

• ESPN said Tuesday that Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final averaged 5.82 million viewers on ABC. The series averaged 4.6 million viewers through five games, up 83 percent over the five-game 2021 series between the Lightning and Canadiens, per SBJ’s Austin Karp. Keep in mind: Two of last year’s games aired on NBCSN and there was a Canadian market (Montreal) as part of the viewership equation. Per Karp, this year’s series was down about 16 percent from the pre-pandemic 2019 final, a seven-gamer between the Bruins and Blues.

The Ink Report

1. I thought these were interesting comments from ESPN tennis analysts Chris Evert and John McEnroe on the All England Club’s decision not to allow Russians and Belarusians to play as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Here is ESPN’s Wimbledon coverage schedule.)

McEnroe: I know it’s a horrific situation. It seemed like a lose-lose decision when they made it. There’s not a lot of good decisions. But if you notice, in other sports and in other tournaments, they’re allowing the Russians to play. I don’t get why at Wimbledon it was decided that they’re not allowed to play. That’s where we’re going to make a stand. You’re asking them to denounce something where they’re afraid if they do so that their family, friends or relatives could get arrested or thrown in prison for 15 years. So that seemed like something you can’t possibly ask the players to do.

Advertisement

Then you take away the points. Let’s say if Djokovic wins the tournament again, he’s going to drop even further in the rankings, which makes no sense. The other part of your question is will it affect the players at the tournament. I don’t believe it’s going to affect too many players at the tournament. It is Wimbledon, after all. It’s one of, if not the biggest tournament we have. To me it’s always been the U.S. Open and Wimbledon are the biggest events. It’s just a damn shame that it’s come to this, especially when you notice that (Daniil) Medvedev is ranked No. 1 right now, of all things. You have another player, Andrey Rublev, who is 7 or 8 in the world. You have a third guy who reached the quarters last year, (Karen) Khachanov. You have two Belarusians in the top 15, I think. It’s very unfortunate it’s come to this. I was hoping something would change before, but it hasn’t.

Evert: I’m conflicted with the Russians being able to play Wimbledon because I understand why the British government feels the way they do. I’m also of a mind now with all the carnage going on over there that at some point all the countries have to stick together, get together, and take away any resource that we are giving to Russia because, I don’t know, lives are being lost. To me that’s more important than sport. We’ve got to really join together and try to stop this because this is bigger than anything. This is bigger than sports. It’s death. That’s the ultimate. I wish we could join together more and try to take away everything we can from Russia until they stop doing this horrific act. That’s how I feel, strongly about it. I feel strongly about any country, by the way, the human rights issue is a big thing now, any country, whether it’s China, Saudi Arabia, whether it’s Russia, to support them so they can pull the wool over everybody’s eyes by having some great sports events. It’s really not right, it’s not ethical.

2. Nick Faldo, CBS Sports’ lead golf analyst since 2007, announced his decision to retire from broadcasting following the last event of CBS’ 2022 golf season. CBS said his last broadcast on CBS will be August 7 with the Wyndham Championship. Trevor Immelman, who joined CBS Sports’ golf team in 2019 and just received a new contract, was named the network’s lead golf analyst.

2a. Fox Sports CEO and executive producer Eric Shanks told Sports Business Journal reporter John Ourand that the USFL will return for a second season and expand into more markets. The league is majority-owned by Fox Sports, and that company has pushed very hard when it comes to marketing the product, including the always-exciting executives trash-talking positive viewership on Twitter.

I remain skeptical of long-term success, but they have a decent viewership story to tell from Year One. Karp said the USFL averaged about 715,000 viewers in its 36 regular-season TV broadcasts on Fox, NBC, FS1 and USA Network through June 23. Karp said seven games averaged over 1 million viewers including the league debut (simulcast on Fox and NBC) drawing 3.1 million. The USFL regular-season finale last week averaged a season-low 181,000 viewers on FS1. I thought this data point was interesting: “On broadcast, USFL averaged just over 1 million (927,000 if you take out the outlier debut simulcast — about what ESPN averaged for the most recent men’s college basketball season,” said Karp. Something to pay attention to via Robert Seidman of Sports TV Ratings heading into next season — some late-season viewership declines this year.

NBC’s broadcast of the USFL semifinals between New Orleans and Birmingham averaged 998,000 viewers.

2b. Viewership for last Thursday’s NBA Draft averaged 3.05 million viewers for both rounds (the second round aired on ESPN only), per ESPN. That was up 33 percent from last year (2.26 million viewers in late July) and basically flat with 2019 (3.09 million). It’s a better number than I expected, even with the network and out-of-home viewership boost. Per Sports Media Watch: The Draft averaged 3.0 or 3.1 million viewers in five of eight years from 2012 to 2019.

Advertisement

3. In case you missed it, I had a long interview with ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro on the NBA, F1, Big Ten, sports betting. Pitaro says ESPN will go after the World Cup again if the rights become available.

3a. Episode 217 of the Sports Media Podcast features two guests. First up is Lindsey Adler, a senior writer for The Athletic covering the New York Yankees. She is followed by Sports Business Journal motorsports and combat sports reporter Adam Stern. In this podcast, Adler discusses what it’s like covering a team that has the potential to make sports history; if there is pressure on covering a team like the Yankees because every game has magnitude; whether people are more interested in reading about a winning team; how winning impacts things for reporters such as subscriptions and page views; the competitiveness of the Yankees beat; how front office people and players look at where she works versus other publications; how access has been this year and the difference from last year; women covering baseball who are under 35; the influences of Suzyn Waldman and Sweeny Murti for her; whether MLB will or should make a statement on the Roe decision and more. Stern discusses why F1 has agreed to renew its rights deal with ESPN through 2025; why Amazon and Comcast executives and Netflix did not get the product; how ESPN will advance the product in the future; what F1’s growth potential is in the U.S.; the importance of a U.S. driver to the growth; the importance of races being on linear television; the explosion of F1 podcasts; where he sees NASCAR’s viewership heading forward; whether a “Drive To Survive” show for IndyCar can move the needle, and more.

You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Stitcher, and more.

4. Non sports pieces of note:

• Amy’s story: After escaping domestic violence, sportswriter’s ex-wife speaks out to help others. By Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times.

• The Ruling Overturning Roe Is an Insult to Women and the Judicial System. By The New York Times Editorial Board.

• Abortion Goes Back to the People. By The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.

Advertisement

• How three sisters (and their mom) tried to swindle the CRA out of millions. By Sarah Treleaven of Macleans.

• The world’s most liveable cities. By The Economist.

• Susquehanna founder and TikTok investor Jeff Yass has avoided $1 billion in taxes while largely escaping public scrutiny. He’s now pouring his money into campaigns to cut taxes and support election deniers. By Justin Elliott, Jesse Eisinger, Paul Kiel, Jeff Ernsthausen and Doris Burke of ProPublica.

• After high court ruling, is it tremors or earthquakes for public education? Chelsea Sheasley of the Christian Science Monitor.

• Sailing the high seas with John Davidson, the superstar time forgot. By Geoff Edgers of The Washington Post.

• Russia will soon exhaust its combat capabilities, Western assessments predict. By Liz Sly of The Washington Post.

• Sports host Megan Reyes, who was a great social media manager for The Athletic a couple of years ago, shares her personal story.

• The end of Roe v. Wade will shake up America for years. Here’s how to tell those stories. By Shefali Luthra of USC’s Center for Health Journalism.

• How many lives have been saved by COVID-19 vaccines? By The Economist.

• A Texas Teen-Ager’s Abortion Odyssey. By Stephania Taladrid of The New Yorker.

• How ‘All the President’s Men’ went from buddy flick to masterpiece. By Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post Magazine.

• A Lost Trove of Civil War Gold, an FBI Excavation, and Some Very Angry Treasure Hunters. By Chris Heath of The Atlantic.

• The fight to keep the Ipswich clam going — along with a way of life that has grown up around it — amid the existential threat of the green crab. By Anna Gibbs of The Boston Globe.

• This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins. By Caroline Kitchener of The Washington Post.

• Supreme Court backs praying coach Joseph Kennedy who knelt on the 50-yard line after games. By John Fritze of USA Today.

Advertisement

• Period-Tracker Apps Aim for Anonymity Following Roe v. Wade Decision. By Cordilia James and Shara Tibken of The Wall Street Journal.

• I left my husband for the most hated man in America. By Laura Pullman of the Sunday Times (UK).

Sports pieces of note:

• The Best Player in Women’s Tennis Isn’t at Wimbledon. She’s Playing Golf Instead. By Joshua Robinson of the Wall Street Journal.

• Danny Almonte’s ex-manager Rolando Paulino still coaching in the Bronx, but Little League scandal tough to shake. By Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News.

• 2023 NBA Draft’s No. 1 pick: Why many think Victor Wembanyama is already locked in. By Mike Vorkunov and Sam Vecenie of The Athletic.

• Former NFL exec testifies Commanders engaged in 2-year battle over his firing. By Daniel Kaplan of The Athletic.

• To avoid being sidelined, an LGBTQ dad reconciles himself to the importance of football in his son’s life. By Bradley Jacobs Sigesmund of Oprah Daily.

• Mark Appel’s long journey takes him to Phillies’ major-league roster, at last. By Matt Gelb of The Athletic.

• Jonquel Jones and the untold story of the WNBA’s reigning MVP. By Katie Barnes of ESPN.com.

• Document reveals details of 2009 sexual assault allegation against Daniel Snyder. By Will Hobson of The Washington Post.

• When Nature Calls, Phillies Relievers Have a Place to Go. By Tyler Kepner of The New York Times.

• A Muslim man won the Stanley Cup. I wrote about it because it matters to my community. By Shireen Ahmed of CBC Sports.

• A side of Omaha you won’t see during the College World Series. By Clinton Yates of Andscape.

• How Jesse Winker’s ejection led to autographs, pizza and the tip of a lifetime. By Stephen J. Nesbitt of The Athletic.

(Top photo: Geoff Burke / USA Today)

ncG1vNJzZmismJqutbTLnquim16YvK57kmxvbGxlaHxzfJFrZmluX2eFcLHSqaVmq5WWu265wp2mp6elnLVuuselZg%3D%3D