Sportsnet's Chris Cuthbert: Third Announcer, Second NHL Voice With 1500 National Telecasts

Chris Cuthbert, who continued a four-decade career as one of the pre-eminent hockey play-by-play announcers on the North American continent when he returned to Hockey Night in Canada in 2020, has become the second NHL announcer and third in the four major pro sports with 1,500 national telecasts to his credit. He reached that round-number milestone on Saturday, Jan. 18, when the Montreal Canadiens hosted the Toronto Maple Leafs as part of the annual Hockey Day in Canada festivities.

At the close of the game, Cuthbert was credited with 1,367 play-by-play appearances. About one in 10 of those play-by-play calls (132) came for a U.S. network, where he has appeared on ESPN, SportsChannel America, Versus and an assortment of NBC channels. The remaining 133 games came as an on-site host or reporter. Forty-five games were simulcast on both sides of the international border: these games are counted on each country’s leaderboard but not double-counted in the total.

(Un/Necessary Sports Research's telecast data comes from the 506 Sports Archive and includes national telecasts only. Teams' local telecasts, including some Maple Leafs telecasts that Cuthbert calls for Sportsnet but which are only available in the team's viewing area, are not included.)

In NHL lore, Cuthbert trails only Bob Cole (1,723) as the most frequent commentator on an English-language national telecast. Dick Stockton also amassed 1,544 games across all four major professional sports, including 23 NHL broadcasts.

A native of Brampton, Ontario, Cuthbert graduated from Queen’s University and was the sports director at CJAD radio in Montreal before joining CBC in 1984. He made his HNIC debut that fall, hosting a Nordiques-Flames tilt in Calgary on Oct. 13 with Jim Robson and John Davidson. The first national play-by-play credit came four weeks later on a Canadiens-Flames game alongside Davidson with Brian McFarlane hosting.

By 1990-91, Cuthbert’s responsibilities had shifted more from hosting to play-by-play, and he helmed one CBC booth in the conference finals annually from 1993 to 2004, working mostly with John Garrett and Greg Millen. (The TSN crew of Gord Miller and Pierre McGuire handled three of the four games of the Wild-Mighty Ducks conference final in 2003, but Cuthbert and Millen were on the lone CBC telecast in Game 1.)

In 2005, as the NHL lockout was concluding, Cuthbert signed with TSN to be their lead football announcer, which would span hundreds of games and 12 consecutive Grey Cups (2008-19) that do not factor into this total. TSN also held NHL cable rights at the time, and he went on to handle more than two dozen games that year, but would not return to a conference final until 2008.

Rogers Communications’ 12-year national contract with the NHL took effect in the fall of 2014, and for the next six years, his only national work came in Canada’s more populous southern neighbor to the tune of 107 games for NBC and NBCSN.

Cuthbert departed TSN in June 2020, rejoining Rogers before that year’s pandemic-delayed playoffs resumed in August. “I’m getting old,” he told the Canadian Press that summer, when he noted that Rogers would hold exclusive national rights until just after his 69th birthday in 2026. “The opportunity to do more playoff hockey and to do hockey on Saturday nights was just too inviting."

That summer, he racked up 43 telecasts in 45 days from the Western Conference playoff bubble in Edmonton as the consolidated playoff schedule allowed broadcast talent to call games without traveling between cities and sometimes set up multiple games on the same day. He would go on to work the 2021 Stanley Cup Final after Jim Hughson cut back to only doing games in Vancouver and assumed the lead role when Cole retired that summer.

As a national play-by-play announcer, Cuthbert has worked with 80 partners, a list led by Scott Russell (264 times) and Craig Simpson (257). Seven other commentators (Greg Millen, Ray Ferraro, Kyle Bukauskas, John Garrett, Scott Oake, Glenn Healy, and Dick Irvin) have appeared with him at least 100 times.

Nevertheless, the game that Wikipedia calls Cuthbert’s breakthrough moment came when he flew solo in 1988. On April 18, CBC sent its lead crew to Game 1 of the Bruins-Canadiens series with Cuthbert stationed in Washington for updates and highlights of the Devils-Capitals game. A blackout smothered Montreal and much of Quebec that night, and while emergency power allowed the game at the Forum to finish, the telecast was unable to continue. That left Cuthbert and producer Jim Hough in Washington for the final two and a half hours of that game and would go on to earn the talent a Gemini award nomination from the Canadian Cinema and Television Academy.

At the team level, Cuthbert has called five of the NHL’s seven Canadian teams more than 200 times each, paced by the Maple Leafs (331) and Oilers (250). His most common American franchise is the Red Wings (112), with the Stars and Avalanche also appearing more than 100 times.

Cuthbert’s NHL career has taken him to 59 rinks, including 29 that were alternate sites or are now defunct; he has yet to call a national game from Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle or the Delta Center in Salt Lake City, although local telecasts may have taken him there. Scotiabank Arena in Toronto has hosted the most Cuthbert telecasts with 152, topping Northlands Coliseum (132) and the Olympic Saddledome. San Jose’s SAP Center edges Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena (39) for the most games in an American facility.

Cuthbert added to his total Wednesday night while we posted this article, handling a Blue Jackets-Maple Leafs telecast on Sportsnet with Simpson and Shawn McKenzie. At his current rate just north of 70 national telecasts a year, Cuthbert could reach Stockton’s total of 1,544 telecasts by the end of this season’s playoffs, with Cole’s mark of 1,723 next in line about two and a half years later.

Announcer Milestones from (Most Of) March 2024

For as much as March seems to be dominated by basketball in the sports media landscape, the announcing milestones of the month seem to be dominated by hockey. What chaos, as Mike Emrick used to say. Some of you might even call it … madness. (This post will conclude with the games of Sunday, March 24, which is the last Sunday before Major League Baseball entered the chat with its 2024 season.)

For the sake of of setting the ground rules, we have five main lists: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL in the U.S. and NHL in Canada. There are also three other lists that exist only by combining those five: NHL totals, totals in the four American leagues, and totals in the five leagues across the board.

Commentators are sorted into three groups – play-by-play, analysts and reporters – and each list has a total column as well. At the moment, these figures only count pro sports, not because I don't think college sports should count but because we had to draw the line somewhere because there are only so many hours to track this stuff. All data is taken from the 506 Sports Archive.

The first installment of this series covers January 2024 and can be found here. The second, which deals with February as you might expect, is here.

Speaking of Emrick, he was the first person to get passed this month. Craig Simpson, the lead Hockey Night in Canada colour commentator since 2008, called a Rangers-Maple Leafs telecast on Saturday, March 2, for his 1,082nd national NHL telecast between the U.S. and Canada. That broke a tie with Emrick for seventh place on that leaderboard. Simpson created the tie a week earlier with the Maple Leafs’ visit to Colorado. Chris Cuthbert and Kyle Bukauskas joined Simpson for both games.

Moments after the Rangers-Maple Leafs game ended, another Hockey Night stalwart hit a milestone of his own, although this one was a round number rather than forging or breaking a tie. The Penguins’ visit to Calgary marked Greg Millen’s 900th national NHL telecast to Canada as an analyst, making him the fourth colour man to the nonacentennial plateau (trailing Simpson, Harry Neale and Dick Irvin). Harnarayan Singh handled play-by-play and Scott Oake reported.

The next milestone didn’t belong to an individual announcer but the history of Canadian hockey broadcasting as a whole. On Sunday afternoon, March 3, Sportsnet 360 picked up the TNT telecast of the Devils’ visit to Los Angeles, and the play-by-play announcer for that game, Kenny Albert, became the 35,000th commentator entered in the Canadian NHL listings. As of this writing, Albert accounts for close to 1 percent of all the commentator entries in our five main listings (and his father Marv accounts for close to another 1 percent), so this is not his first rodeo on the milestone listings. Ed Olczyk and Brian Boucher worked the game with the younger Albert and followed him into the history books.

Like a trailing point on a railroad track, Rogers reporters Ryan Leslie and Shawn McKenzie combined to move past Brian Engblom as two movements merged into one over the first full week of March. Engblom served as a reporter for 197 national NHL telecasts, mostly on ESPN in the 1990s and early 2000s, and that total ranked 16th on the binational list of NHL reporters. Then it didn’t. On Monday, March 4, McKenzie matched Engblom’s total when he worked a Bruins-Maple Leafs telecast with Cuthbert and Simpson. Before that game had quite finished, Leslie created a three-way tie by reporting on the Kraken-Flames game alongside Rick Ball and Kelly Hrudey. In fact, the Sportsnet audience watching McKenzie’s game would go on to join Leslie’s game in progress. McKenzie finished the pass on Wednesday, March 6, with a Sabres-Maple Leafs game called by the same crew, and Leslie passed Engblom the next night on Flames-Lightning with Millen in for Hrudey.

Back on the basketball court, TNT analyst Stan Van Gundy combined with his brother Jeff, who analyzed 15 NBA Finals for ABC, to reach the 1,000-game plateau in their announcing careers. As of the Celtics-Nuggets game on March 7, which the elder Stan called with Brian Anderson and Chris Haynes, Jeff had worked 857 national telecasts and Stan 143 to rack up 1,000. At that point, another TNT analyst had combined with his sister to work 1,097 games: Reggie Miller had called 664 games and Cheryl Miller 433.

Jeff Van Gundy’s longtime partner, Mike Breen, moved up the overall total list on Saturday, March 9. Breen called his 1,090th national telecast, passing Emrick for #13, when ABC televised a Celtics-Suns game from Phoenix in their weekend primetime slot that saw Breen work with Doris Burke, JJ Redick and Lisa Salters. Breen had forged the tie three nights earlier on an ESPN telecast of Bucks-Warriors with Bob Myers and Jorge Sedano.

Further west, McKenzie hit a milestone the same night as he became the 16th person to report on 200 NHL telecasts between the U.S. and Canada. John Shorthouse and Jamal Mayers were in the booth for the puckhandling plateau, which aired on Citytv and Sportsnet One.

TNT’s lead NBA play-caller, Kevin Harlan, spent Pi Day bringing home the bacon in Boston, where it may well have been a clam chowder ingredient. The second Suns-Celtics meeting in six days was his 1,400th national telecast among the four major pro sports, covering the NFL and NBA in Harlan’s case. He became the third announcer to hit that milestone in the United States, trailing Marv Albert and Dick Stockton; including Canada, Bob Cole and Cuthbert have also done so, although Cuthbert has not yet reached that point on play-by-play alone. Reggie Miller and Allie LaForce joined Harlan on the broadcast.

Back on the left coast, another TNT play-by-play announcer moved up, although this particular telecast aired in Canada on Sportsnet East, Ontario and Pacific. The Massachusetts-born John Forslund called his 448th national NHL telecast on play-by-play, breaking a tie with Dan Kelly, who hailed from Ottawa but drew acclaim as the voice of the St. Louis Blues. Forslund worked the Capitals-Kraken game for the Kraken local feed with JT Brown, Alison Lukan and Piper Shaw, and had joined Brown and Shaw two nights earlier for the tying game against the Golden Knights.

Citytv and Sportsnet One were home to an NHL reporting milestone for the second straight Saturday on March 16 when Leslie became the 17th rinkside rover to report on 200 national telecasts between the U.S. and Canada, repeating McKenzie’s feat of a week earlier. Ball and Millen staffed the booth for a Canadiens-Flames affair that also aired on CBC.

Later that night on CBC, longtime reporter Scott Oake moved up the NHL listings with his 1,256th telecast, passing Dick Irvin for fourth place. The Avalanche-Oilers contest also aired on three of the four Sportsnet regional channels (everything but Pacific) alongside Sportsnet 360 with Singh and Louie DeBrusk on the call. Oake had tied Irvin a week earlier when the Canucks hosted the Jets on CBC, City, Sportsnet, Sportsnet One and Sportsnet 360; on that game, Dave Tomlinson was in the analyst chair rather than DeBrusk.

Another Hockey Night veteran passed a third fixture of winter Saturday nights north of the border, although it happened on a Wednesday when the Maple Leafs visited Washington on March 20. Chris Cuthbert’s 1,309th national NHL play-by-play call (combining the two countries we track) passed Jim Hughson for second-most on record, trailing Cole. Simpson handled color duties and McKenzie reported for Sportsnet. Simpson and Bukauskas were with Cuthbert four nights earlier on the same network when he tied Hughson as the Hurricanes visited Toronto.

South of the border, Darren Pang worked his 800th national NHL telecast (again combining the two countries) on the same Maple Leafs-Capitals game. In the United States, the telecast aired on TNT with Brendan Burke on the call and Tarik El-Bashir reporting.

While much of America was preoccupied with college basketball, the longtime voice of the NHL team near Tobacco Road hit an NHL milestone on Friday, March 22, as Forslund’s call of the Kraken’s visit to Arizona was his 450th national telecast between the United States and Canada. Only 11 other play-by-play voices have hit that number. Sportsnet picked up the Seattle telecast with Forslund, Brown and Shaw. (Incidentally, this is the last milestone telecast to date involving the Coyotes, who played their last game on April 17 before their franchise was suspended and its hockey-related assets transferred to Utah.)

Cuthbert wrapped up this edition of the milestone tracker on Saturday, March 23, which would have been the 95th birthday of Roger Bannister, the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes. Cuthbert’s 1,310th national NHL play-by-play telecast between the United States and Canada passed Hughson again – Hughson picked up a single MLB telecast for ABC in 1994, so his total in our five main listings is 1,309, one more than the NHL total Cuthbert passed on March 20. That March 20 game, covered above, was Cuthbert’s tying telecast here.

At the close of that week, with baseball season looming on the horizon, Burke and Oake sat in ties that would not be broken until the next edition of this series.