Milestones aren't supposed to happen very often. That's kind of the point. An announcer's total only ends in two 0s every 100 games, and while a number of the announcers that we know have racked up totals in the four-figure range, it's taken years of work to get there.
Nevertheless, four Saturdays before the end of the 2025-26 NHL regular season, Hockey Night in Canada will see four of its longtime commentators rack up landmark totals on the same night.
Chris Cuthbert — 1,445 play-by-play telecasts
Hockey Night started with Maple Leafs home games in 1931, and Toronto finds itself on the road tonight, but the Leafs' visit to the national capital nevertheless includes a pair of the milestones.
Cuthbert, who returned to HNIC in 2020 following a 15-year run at TSN, will handle his 1,445th national NHL telecast as the play-by-play announcer. That breaks a tie with Dick Stockton, who worked 1,444 national telecasts of the NFL, NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball during his career. Cuthbert will assume sole possession of fifth place on our play-by-play leaderboard across those four major pro sports.
(Cuthbert's Canadian Football League coverage is not included in those figures, because we don't exactly have historical CFL announcer listings laying around. When he worked a game that was simulcast in both the United States and Canada, that game counts on both countries' leaderboard but only once on the total leaderboard, which is why his overall total is less than the sum of his two country totals: 1,329 and 161.)
Bob Cole, Kenny Albert, Kevin Harlan and Marv Albert hold the top four spots on that leaderboard, although Cole and the elder Albert are no longer active to increase their totals.
