Joe Buck's 1000th Game And Other Stories

 Has it really been most of a month since we did the announcer milestones update? Well, things have to slow down now, with all three tennis majors over for the year and a maximum of 10 MLB games left.

And since we do these in chronological order, consider the lead (the big round number of the day) buried.

Announcer totals here are complete through end of day Friday, Oct. 16.

1. September 23: Mark Jackson calls his 550th national NBA telecast in Game 4 of the Celtics-Heat series. He's the ninth person to that milestone overall and the fourth color commentator to get there, trailing Hubie Brown, Jeff Van Gundy and Doug Collins.
2. September 23: Mike Emrick calls his 1,074th national NHL telecast between the U.S. and Canada, tying longtime Hockey Night in Canada analyst Harry Neale for the seventh-most appearances on the sport between the two countries. Emrick passes Neale two days later with game number 1,075.
3. September 24: With Game 4 of the Lakers-Nuggets series, Brian Anderson calls his 117th national NBA telecast, passing Dan Shulman for no. 16 on the PBP announcer list.
4. September 25: The Cubs-White Sox game is Rick Sutcliffe's 577th national MLB telecast as a color commentator, which passes John Madden for 12th-most among the four major U.S. sports. Including Hockey Night in Canada, Sutcliffe is 17th among analysts.
5. September 25: Jim Hughson calls his 1,300th telecast in our records (this includes a bunch of Canadian NHL games, several American NHL games and a solitary MLB telecast). He's the fifth person to get to the 1,300 plateau (trailing Bob Cole, Dick Stockton, Marv Albert and Pierre McGuire).
6. September 26: The Phillies play the Rays on the last weekend of the MLB regular season, but more importantly John Smoltz calls his 400th national MLB telecast. He's the 17th person to reach that mark (more on 400 below) and the fifth color man to get there (behind Joe Morgan, Tim McCarver, Tony Kubek and Sutcliffe).
7. September 26: The Stanley Cup Final plays on back-to-back days and Jim Hughson calls his 1,300th NHL game in our records between the U.S. and Canada. The only other two people to have done that are Bob Cole and Pierre McGuire.
8. September 27: The Moose gets loose and Daryl Johnston breaks down his 350th NFL game as the 49ers play the Giants on Fox. He's the 21st NFL game-caller to reach the 350 mark and the seventh analyst to get there (Madden, Dierdorf, Simms, Maguire, Aikman and Collinsworth got there first).
9. September 27: For the first time, the Las Vegas Raiders make an appearance in these pages as they play the Patriots in Massachusetts. CBS play-by-play man Jim Nantz handles the play-by-play of his 400th NFL game, the ninth PBP man and 16th person overall to do that. (Michaels, Stockton, Criqui, Summerall, Jones, Enberg, Harlan and Kenny Albert were the first eight PBP men. If you knew that ... wow.)
10. September 27: The final game of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals ends in a tie ... in the announcer listings. Jeff Van Gundy calls his 708th national game, all as an NBA color man, tying Gary Green of hockey fame for 12th-most in our aggregated color commentator rankings. JVG finishes the pass with Game 1 of the Finals on Sept. 30.
11. September 28: The last game of the NHL season sees Ed Olczyk call his 771st national telecast, matching the number handled by Pat Summerall in our records. They share 19th place on our American big-four-sports list until next season starts (or we adjust some historical records). 
12. October 4: Pam Oliver becomes the first NFL sideline reporter to work 450 games when the Browns play the Cowboys. Only 10 people have appeared on more NFL telecasts than Oliver.
13. October 5: Here's how long Pam Oliver has been a fixture on NFL sidelines. Tracy Wolfson is CBS's lead sideline reporter and has been since 2014. That includes a couple of years where she double-dipped on Sunday and Thursday, and she was with CBS before she moved up to the top team. Wolfson is barely a third of the way to Oliver's total. Her 159th game, the Monday Evening Football special between the Patriots and Chiefs, ties her with Suzy Kolber for fifth-most in NFL history by a sideline reporter (trailing Oliver, Michele Tafoya, Laura Okmin and Armen Keteyian). She finishes the pass with her 160th game, Giants-Cowboys, on Oct. 11.
14. October 8: Baseball decides to show up on this list again. Matt Vasgersian calls Game 3 of the Dodgers-Padres series on MLB Network, tying Steve Physioc for the 13th-most national telecasts by a play-by-play announcer. They both have 311. They both will for the foreseeable future as this was Vasgersian's last game of the season.
15. October 8: In that same Dodgers-Padres game 3, John Smoltz calls his 403rd national MLB telecast, matching Gary Thorne for 16th-most on record. The series ended that night, so he wouldn't complete the pass (with game no. 404, matching Atlanta's classic area code) until the NLCS opener on Oct. 12.
16. October 11: Farther down the NFL sideline reporter list, Jennifer Hale ties Bonnie Bernstein with her 141st game as a reporter, Panthers-Falcons. They share ninth place on that list until Sunday, unless something weird happens.
17. October 11: One of Fox's original NFL announcers, Kenny Albert, ties Paul Maguire for 13th on the NFL telecasts list with his 428th game as the Eagles meet the Steelers. Albert will break that tie on Sunday, unless something weird happens.
18. October 12: In addition to the John Smoltz/Atlanta area code thing mentioned in item no. 15, the NLCS opener between the Dodgers and Braves is Tom Verducci's 400th MLB telecast. He's the 18th person to get to that point.
19. October 13: Tom Verducci's 196th game as a sideline reporter, Braves-Dodgers game 2, ties Heather Cox for 16th on our list in the four major pro sports. He passes her the next night in Game 3.
20. October 16: Game 5 of the Dodgers-Braves series is the 1,000th time Joe Buck has handled play-by-play for a network NFL or MLB telecast. He is the ninth person overall and seventh PBP man to get there in the U.S.; including Canada he's 17th and 11th respectively.
21. October 16: Game 5 of the Dodgers-Braves series is also John Smoltz's 408th MLB telecast, tying Curt Gowdy for 15th all-time.

Three HNIC Analysts Simultaneously Call Milestone Games

This round of announcer database updates involves a lot of hockey, because most of the announcer database updates I make between January and April involve hockey. So we start this post with arguably the two most iconic songs in televised hockey, one for each side of the 49th parallel.




(Standard disclaimer: These announcer totals come from the lists maintained at The 506 Forums (free registration required to view); in this post, we're working with data posted by Tim Brulia. And as always, you can see the top 16 in each category on our TV databases page.)

North of the border, CBC has not only showed more network hockey than any of its competition, but it has still aired more than half of the 9,190 games in the database. In the U.S., the network currently known as NBCSN has that lead, but Disney still comes out ahead thanks to more than 1,100 games on each of ESPN and ESPN2.

A trio of Sportsnet analysts reached career milestones last Saturday. Working Maple Leafs-Red Wings in CBC's last telecast from Joe Louis Arena, Craig Simpson became the fourth color man to work 650 network games; he trails only Dick Irvin, Harry Neale and Greg Millen.

In Tampa, Garry Galley handled color for the 350th time, becoming the 10th analyst to reach that milestone and 24th commentator across all three tracked positions.

Millen, meanwhile, was in Winnipeg handling the Senators-Jets tilt alongside R.J. Broadhead. That was Millen's 711th appearance, all on color. Seven hundred eleven is not at all a round number; it's really rather straight. Why, you ask, is this important?

Brian McFarlane is the author of more than 90 books about hockey and the honorary president of the Society for International Hockey Research. He's sort of a big deal. Over a 27-year career from 1964-91, McFarlane covered 710 games on Hockey Night in Canada (and got banned from one NHL press box in the process). Millen's 711th game moved him past McFarlane into ninth place on the all-time Canadian list.

And since I assume I'm not the only person whose mind went off on this tangent, there appear to be three 7-Elevens in Winnipeg.

Slightly farther down the list of color commentators, Pierre McGuire appeared on Canadian national television for the 517th time on Feb. 25 when Sportsnet picked up the NBC broadcast of the Flyers-Penguins Stadium Series game at Heinz Field. That slid him past Glenn Healy for the fifth-most color appearances on Canadian networks.

Finally, Jim Hughson continues his ascent up the leaderboard; with his 1,074th game on Feb. 11, he passed Harry Neale for the third-most appearances in any capacity.

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With that lame 49th-parallel allusion behind us, we can move ahead to the American commentator listings. At some level, these are easier, with an eight-man Mount Rushmore (Gary Thorne and Bill Clement; Mike Emrick, Ed Olczyk and McGuire; Dave Strader, Brian Engblom and Darren Pang) that's head and shoulders above the field: a gap of almost 250 appearances separates eighth-place Olczyk and ninth-place Dan Kelly.

(If obvious wordplay about natural landmarks bothers you ... this is the wrong blog.)

A native of Wabash County, Indiana, Emrick is the dean of American NHL play-by-play men, at least at the national level, with a career that started in 1973 in Port Huron, Michigan. His first national work on the NHL came on March 29, 1987, a Bruins-Blackhawks tilt from Chicago Stadium.

Almost 30 years later, Emrick needs 94 more games to match his inaugural partner, Bill Clement, for the most network telecasts in U.S. TV history. Only Marv Albert and Hubie Brown have more in a single sport; more on that to come later. Emrick's 900th game was the Blackhawks-Wild game on Feb. 8; he ends play April 5 with 907 telecasts, and as NBC's lead voice will probably pick up 20 or so more during the playoffs.

Thanks to a pair of rinkside-reporter gigs for ESPN in 2002 and 2003, Olczyk's overall total runs two games ahead of his analyst figure; his 600th network game was Feb. 12 (Red Wings-Wild), 10 days before his 600th analyst appearance on Feb. 22.

McGuire, unburdened by a team contract, has widened his lead over Olczyk by 16 games this year; he'll call his 50th game of 2016-17 with the season-ending Capitals-Bruins tilt on Sunday. McGuire took the sixth overall spot from Pang on March 29, the 30th anniversary of Emrick's ESPN debut.

Sunday, April 2 marked the point at which one-third of American network NHL telecasts have come under the NBC/OLN/Versus deals inked after the lockout. This does not include 158 regular-season games on HDNet (now AXS TV) from 2005-08.

The cable end of that contract (NBC, I mean) celebrated a pair of milestones this spring as well. A pair of regional telecasts on the final day of February were the 1499th and 1500th NHL games on that channel under three different names, with a Hurricanes-Islanders game on March 13 marking the point at which NBCSN has aired one-fourth of all NHL telecasts in the log.

On March 12, the NBC Sports Group and Comcast aired their 2000th NHL game, a Wild-Blackhawks matchup from Chicago. For purposes of this calculation, games on USA since 2015 count, as do all games on NBC and NBCSN from those networks' inception; however, USA's run as the league's cable partner from 1979-85 does not count since it was not in either conglomerate's portfolio at that point.

Finally, the Feb. 6 Blues-Flyers game was the 6,000th game in the American log.

The NHL playoffs begin next week, with somewhere between 60 and 105 games all set for national telecasts on both sides of the border.

Later this week, we'll take a look at milestones in the NBA and Major League Baseball. For NFL reading, Jeff Haggar's history of #1 analyst demotions from 2013 at Classic TV Sports seems ... shall we say ... topical.