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.

Announcer Milestones From February 2024

If there are two things in life that are notorious for putting people to sleep, they are Thanksgiving turkey and bookkeeping details. Today is the fourth Thursday in November, so our staff (which is, uh, me) decided it was time to put a serving of both of those things on the same plate and get them out the door. Without further, let alone Freddy, Adu, here is the Un/Necessary Sports Research list of national telecast announcer milestones from February 2024.

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 stars of the NHL were out in full force in Toronto on Saturday, Feb. 3, even though the NHL All-Star Game took place at 3 p.m. local time. The four-team, 3-on-3 tournament counts as a single broadcast in our records because it’s still 60 minutes of hockey. Two-thirds of Rogers’ lead NHL crew moved up a leaderboard that day. Craig Simpson broke a tie with Harry Neale for the eighth-most appearances in NHL history, combining the U.S. and Canada, and the 16th-most appearances across our five main listings with his 1076th telecast. Kyle Bukauskas worked his 378th telecast as a reporter, passing Brian McFarlane for the ninth-most in our binational NHL records. Chris Cuthbert, the regular third man in that booth, helmed the telecast from the play-by-play position while analyst Kevin Bieksa and reporter David Amber made special All-Star Game appearances. Simpson had tied Neale on Jan. 27’s Maple Leafs-Senators telecast while Bukauskas tied McFarlane four days later on the Jan. 31 game between Nashville and Ottawa.

The following afternoon, the annals of broadcasting history shifted to London, and not the one that’s a couple of hours down the 401 away from Scotiabank Arena. At the Emirates Stadium in Holloway, on the north side of the English capital city, former Arsenal right back Lee Dixon broadcast his 380th Premier League fixture since NBC assumed broadcast rights in this country in 2013. That number represents an entire season of every match in the league or 10 seasons for a single club. Jon Champion and Graeme le Saux joined Dixon on the telecast.

Simpson edged his way past Neale again on Monday, Feb. 5, when the Maple Leafs hosted the New York Islanders as NHL regular-season play resumed. Again, the number was 1,076 appearances, but this time the category was different, counting only analyst appearances on NHL national telecasts to the U.S. or Canada. (Simpson was an ice-level reporter for ESPN on an Avalanche-Mighty Ducks game in 1998, which counted toward his overall total but not his analyst figure.) That gave Simpson sole possession of the number-two spot on the binational NHL analyst list, trailing only Pierre McGuire, and third place on the analyst list across all five main listings, also trailing Hubie Brown. For the second time in three days, Cuthbert joined Simpson across the Sportsnet family of networks; this time, Shawn McKenzie was the reporter.

Tuesday, Feb. 6, marked the fourth day in a row with a milestone as ESPN hockey analyst A.J. Mleczko moved up the American NHL rankings. Her 137th national broadcast as a color commentator, Avalanche-Devils on ESPN+ with John Buccigross, broke a tie with Darren Eliot for the 11th-most in our records. Mleczko, a two-time Olympic medalist, had tied Eliot on Jan. 23 when the Ducks hosted the Sabres.

Toronto has as good a claim as any city to being the ancestral home of national hockey broadcasting, since it was there that Foster Hewitt’s gondola hung in Maple Leaf Gardens to originate Hockey Night in Canada, and the city hosted a milestone for Hockey Night’s current lead commentator on Wednesday, Feb. 7. Chris Cuthbert became the third person in our records to handle play-by-play for 1,300 national NHL telecasts between the U.S. and Canada, reaching the plateau on a Stars-Maple Leafs telecast with Simpson and McKenzie. He trails Bob Cole and, at the time, Jim Hughson on the NHL list as well as Marv Albert, Dick Stockton, Kevin Harlan and Kenny Albert from the four main American lists.

Across the border in Boston, Mike Breen passed another longtime NBA broadcaster on the same night. The Hawks-Celtics game was Breen’s 1,085th national telecast between the NBA and NFL, pushing him ahead of Hubie Brown (a former Hawks coach) for the seventh-most appearances in our four American listings and 13th-most counting Canadian NHL work. JJ Redick was the color man and Andraya Carter reported. Breen had tied Brown on a Lakers-Knicks telecast the previous weekend with Doris Burke and Lisa Salters.

TD Garden was also the venue for a milestone the following night, albeit in a different sport and for a different country. Sportsnet reporter Dan Murphy, who primarily covers the Vancouver Canucks, reported on his 228th national telecast when Vancouver met the Bruins, passing Christine Simpson for the 13th most national reporterial repetitions in Canadian NHL history. John Shorthouse and Dave Tomlinson anchored the booth that night as they had when Murphy tied Simpson on Jan. 27 against Columbus.

The parade of milestones took a break on Friday, Feb. 9, but Hockey Night was at it again that weekend. Edmonton-based analyst Louie DeBrusk called the Oilers’ visit to Los Angeles on Saturday night: his 412th national NHL telecast to the U.S. or Canada broke a tie with McFarlane for 16th most for a colour commentator. Harnarayan Singh handled play-by-play and Scott Oake reported on that game after Jack Michaels and Gene Principe joined DeBrusk for the tying tilt in Las Vegas four nights earlier.

Early February saw a total of 11 milestones in a 10-day span which concluded with two more in a Calgary Flames road trip to the American portion of the East Coast. The Flames’ Sunday visit to the New York Islanders was the 192nd national NHL telecast of Ryan Leslie’s career, which moved him past Al Trautwig for 17th-most by a reporter between the U.S. and Canada. The next night in suburban Miami, colour man Greg Millen worked his 900th Canadian NHL telecast when the Flames visited the Panthers, which made Millen the ninth person to reach that mark. Play-by-play man Rick Ball called both bouts and was with Leslie and Kelly Hrudey when the former tied Trautwig on the Flames-Bruins game the previous Tuesday.

Following a midmonth slowdown that was helped in part by the NBA’s all-star break, Oilers-centric reporter and Prince of Puns Gene Principe got the derricks working again on Friday, Feb. 23 when he passed Frank Selke for the 11th-most appearances by a Canadian NHL reporter with his 264th game. That Wild-Oilers affair on the Albertan prairie was called from the booth by Michaels and DeBrusk, who had also been with Principe two nights earlier when Boston came calling and he tied Selke.

A colorful clash between the St. Louis Blues and the Detroit Red Wings on Saturday, Feb. 24, sent ESPN NHL reporter Leah Hextall up the leaderboard as well. (From 1979 to 2017, the Red Wings played in Joe Louis Arena: the building’s namesake, a Detroit native, was known as the Brown Bomber, which would have added to the colorful motif. The Red Wings have since moved to Little Caesars Arena, and anyway, we’re digressing.) That day, her 56th American national NHL telecast as a reporter allowed Hextall to pass Darren Pang for 10th place on that list. Bob Wischusen and Kevin Weekes called the game for ABC: Wischusen and the Blues were both involved in Hextall’s tying game, a Presidents’ Day matinee against the Maple Leafs, the previous Monday. Ryan Callahan handled color for the Monday game.

The dean of active NBA sideline reporters, Lisa Salters, reached her septuacentennial milestone later that night. The Celtics-Knicks game at Madison Square Garden on ABC was Salters’ 700th national telecast between the NBA and NFL: only Craig Sager has more sideline appearances in the four major American listings and Oake joins the list when we add Canadian NHL work. The game also broke a tie with Fox baseball insider Ken Rosenthal, who had 699 reporter credits at that point. Breen, Redick and Burke called the game with Salters: Breen and Burke also worked with her when she tied Rosenthal on the Feb. 10 Suns-Warriors game.

ESPN reporter Cassidy Hubbarth got in on the action on Sunday, Feb. 25, when she passed Heather Cox for ninth place on the NBA courtside reporter list by working her 182nd national telecast. Brown and Dave Pasch joined Hubbarth from the city of American independence as the 76ers hosted the Bucks. Hubbarth tied Cox on Feb. 11 with a Celtics-Heat game alongside Redick, Ryan Ruocco and Richard Jefferson.

As February drew to a close, Craig Simpson had lined himself up for another leaderboard pass, but that bit of detail will have to wait until this series moves along to March.

Announcer Milestones from January 2024

It’s high time to do some accounting around here, in the form of spelling out the 15 announcer milestones that happened in January on the way to 192, and counting, in 2024. There are parts of the year where we can cover a lot of ground pretty quickly on that front: anything between about Father’s Day and Labor Day is, after all, the offseason in basketball, football and hockey. January is not one of those times, which is why I’m currently staring down the prospect of writing eight or nine more of these to finish the year. So let’s get started.

 
(By way 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 Nuggets-Warriors game on Thursday, Jan. 4 marked the 250th play-by-play appearance of Brian Anderson’s career, making him the 10th announcer to reach that point. The late game of the TNT doubleheader featured Anderson on the call with Stan Van Gundy and Allie LaForce.

One night later, Doris Burke worked her way out of another 10th-place spot on an NBA list, calling her 314th national game as an analyst to break the tie with Steve Kerr and move into ninth place outright. (Burke and Kerr had been tied since Christmas 2023.) The Knicks-76ers game that broke the tie included Mike Breen on play-by-play and Katie George courtside.

2024’s first edition of Hockey Night in Canada included an announcer milestone in the early window. Maple Leafs-Sharks marked Craig Simpson’s 1050th national NHL telecast to Canada: he was the second analyst to that mark, trailing only Harry Neale, and seventh person overall. Chris Cuthbert handled play-by-play for the game with Kyle Bukauskas reporting.

Another milestone later in the weekend was also sparked by HNIC, because Kelly Hrudey’s appearance on Rogers’ studio panel in Toronto pressed Greg Millen into service on the Flames-Blackhawks telecast on Sunday, Jan. 7, in Chicago. The matinee telecast (with Rick Ball on play-by-play and Ryan Leslie reporting) was Millen’s 900th national NHL telecast between the U.S. and Canada, becoming the seventh hockey analyst to reach that point and the eighth color person in any sport we track.

Two HNIC stalwarts moved up on the first weekend of the year, but another got passed, albeit on the gridiron. Fox’s Erin Andrews appeared on the sidelines of the Cowboys-Commanders season finale on Sunday, Jan. 7. That marked her 413th sideline appearance across our five main listings, which broke a tie with Elliotte Friedman for #13 on that list. Kevin Burkhardt, Greg Olsen and Tom Rinaldi rounded out the crew for America’s Game of the Week.

The third Hall of Famer taken in the 1984 NHL Entry Draft was, paradoxically, Tom Glavine, who would go on to win 305 games and win a World Series with the Braves of the 1990s. The third overall pick in that draft, Ed Olczyk, is one of three people to handle 900 American national NHL telecasts as the analyst after hitting the milestone on Wednesday, Jan. 10, with a Golden Knights-Avalanche contest alongside Kenny Albert and Brian Boucher.

The television history of soccer in the United States is less well-documented than some other sports, in part because it’s difficult to gauge exactly what constitutes a “major” competition (as opposed to something like the World Series, which was established 17 years before the first commercial radio broadcast). But the Premier League is undoubtedly the league with the highest combination of viewership and international prestige in the U.S. today, and we started counting their commentators when NBC took over American TV rights in 2013. On Sunday, Jan. 14, analyst Graeme le Saux became the second person in that span to appear on 400 telecasts when Manchester United hosted Tottenham Hotspur. Play-by-play man Jon Champion found out about this and informed le Saux on the air, which sparked a minute-long conversation about how everything has a statistic now. (Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to post the video clip without running into an automated PL copyright censor.)

Back on the west side of the Atlantic, intrepid ESPN reporter Lisa Salters handled her 694th and 695th sideline reports in our listings in January. The 694th game, which tied Dave Hodge for the fourth-most reports in our five main listings, was a Texans-Colts game on Saturday, Jan. 6, while the 695th game that passed him was the Eagles-Buccaneers wild-card matchup five days later. Joe Buck and Troy Aikman staffed the booth for both games.

When Jon Champion brought up announcer counting on Jan. 14, he probably didn’t have an inkling that he was a week away from his own milestone, but he was. Sunday, Jan. 21, marked his 190th Premier League telecast back to the U.S. in the NBC era: 190 might not seem like an exceptionally round number, but it marks 5 complete seasons for a single PL club (or half of an entire season across the league). He again shared the gantry with le Saux for the Bournemouth-Liverpool clash.

Later that weekend, another NBC stalwart unseated an immortal in his field, albeit not in that immortal’s most recognizable record. Sunday Night Football play-by-play voice Mike Tirico’s 571st national play-by-play telecast across the four major U.S. pro sports broke a tie with Pat Summerall for #19 on the all-time list. Despite being played on a Sunday afternoon, Buccaneers-Lions still counted after Rams-Lions had been the tying telecast on Jan. 14. Cris Collinsworth analyzed both games with Melissa Stark on the sideline.

On Wednesday, Jan. 24, the milestone trackers went back inside. TNT hockey voice Brendan Burke called his 155th national NHL telecast on the American side, a Hurricanes-Bruins tilt with Jennifer Botterill and Boucher, to pass Pat Foley for 15th after tying him on Wild-Stars two weeks earlier. On the hardwood, ESPN mainstay Mike Breen called Suns-Mavericks that night with Doris Burke analyzing and Cassidy Hubbarth courtside: the game was Breen’s 1082nd in the four major U.S. pro sports, breaking a tie with Mike Emrick for the eighth-most on record. Breen had tied Emrick with a Mavericks-Lakers game on Jan. 17.

If Breen’s voice is synonymous with ESPN’s NBA coverage in 2024, his TNT counterpart is Kevin Harlan, who has a history in both kinds of inflatable leather balls thanks to also having decades of NFL experience. Those figures combined to push Harlan to his 1,392nd career national telecast on Thursday, Jan. 25, which passed Pierre McGuire for fifth-most across our five main listings. The tiebreaking game was a Celtics-Heat contest with Reggie Miller and Allie LaForce. (Yes, we realize the irony in a hockey announcer getting passed in a game involving the Heat.) The Grizzlies and Timberwolves played Harlan’s tying game on Jan. 18.

Not to be outdone, the Calgary Flames find themselves in the seemingly-contradictory position of merging fire and ice in the same sport, and they hosted a milestone game on Saturday, Jan. 27. The Chicago-Calgary tilt on the latter half of HNIC marked Scott Oake’s 1250th national NHL telecast, all as a reporter: he was the first reporter in any sport to reach that mark, and among all flavors of commentator he sat fifth on the NHL list and 10th in the five main listings. Ball and Millen helmed the booth at the Saddledome.

The final NFL milestone of the 2023-24 season came Sunday, Jan. 28, in the AFC championship between the Chiefs and Ravens. Tracy Wolfson, CBS’s lead sideline reporter, worked her 266th game across the four main U.S. pro sports to pass Tom Verducci for 13th on that list. (Verducci also has even more MLB telecasts under his belt as an analyst, but those don’t count toward his reporter total here.) Wolfson had tied Verducci a week earlier with the Chiefs-Ravens divisional game. Jim Nantz and Tony Romo called both games.

A pair of NHL milestones snuck in under the wire on the last day of January. Sportsnet reporter Shawn McKenzie passed Al Trautwig for the 17th-most reporter appearances on our five main lists (192) when he handled Senators-Red Wings with Harnarayan Singh and Garry Galley. Olczyk pushed his total to 904 total games, the 13th-most across all three commentator flavors in America, and passed Craig Sager when he called Kings-Predators with Albert and Boucher. (McKenzie had tied Trautwig on Canadiens-Penguins the previous weekend while Olczyk matched Sager on the Blackhawks-Kraken game Jan. 24.)

Four commentators (Simpson, Bukauskas, A.J. Mleczko and Dan Murphy) ended January in ties that we will cover when the series moves on to February.

Announcer Milestones From The Fourth Quarter Of 2017

(Not actually me, but it could be.)
Licensed under CC BY-NC 2.5.

Cycling through another round of biweekly database updates, I note that we haven't given some milestones their due recently, either on the blog or on Twitter. So without further ado, here are a couple of handfuls of updates on the vital statistics of several announcers, teams and networks. They're presented in chronological order.

(Standard disclaimer: Announcer totals contained herein come from the lists maintained at The 506 Forums (free registration required to view). As always, you can see the top 16 in each category on our TV databases page.)

October 4 - When the puck drops on the NHL's centennial season, Mike Emrick becomes the first American announcer to handle 900 play-by-play broadcasts for that league on national television. The broadcast pulled him within 71 games of former partner Bill Clement for the most in (American) NHL history.

As of this post (December 17), you could combine the totals of the next five active play-by-play announcers and you'd still be short of Emrick's 910 games; that math also counts Sam Rosen as "active" based strictly on their local work, as his last national gig outside of simulcasts was on the network then called VS. in 2011.

October 17 - The NBA's season opener gets right to work rewriting the record books, as Kevin Harlan's 671st national telecasts pushes him past the number we have confirmed for Doug Collins. By that measure, Harlan is fifth all-time; in truth, he's probably not there quite yet. 

(Collins worked for TNT in the early 1990s, which is one of the eras where the listings I'm working off of are not quite complete. Based on the confirmations posted to The506 Forums and the interpolations of the late John Moynihan, his final total is somewhere in the 690s, which puts Harlan on track to get there around the All-Star break.)

October 21 - Scott Oake becomes the seventh documented announcer to call 1,000 NHL games in Canada, and the first to do so as a host and/or rinkside reporter, with the Wild-Flames matchup from Calgary.

The figures for Ron MacLean merit, at the least, an honorable mention here because of the way records were kept as the role of the Hockey Night In Canada host evolved. 

From 1957 until the mid-1990s, each game had its own host that handled player interviews and between-periods segments; this person is credited on each game broadcast. In about 1996, CBC shifted to having a singular central studio for all of its games: even though the studio is in Toronto, which often hosts one of the games, that led to the introduction of a second person to do interviews, which is the one credited for those games.

After racking up more than 500 games in the older role, MacLean shifted into the studio in the mid-90s. If you count his time as host, often on the order of 50 or 60 games a year, he'd be well beyond Oake and into Bob Cole territory (see Dec. 5 below).

In each of our other databases, studio hosts aren't recorded; however, the three-act structure of a hockey game means that the intermission host gets more face time than the halftime host in basketball or football -- and that's especially true if a game goes beyond regulation, which can happen ad infinitum in the league's most visible games. So I'm not sure how to weigh those factors against one another.

(At a far more practical level, I don't have record of who the studio hosts were on a night-by-night basis beginning in 1996-97, so I can't properly credit them even if that route makes sense.)

November 1 - Mike Breen's call of the Rockets-Knicks game makes him the second person in NBA history to do play-by-play of 750 nationally-televised games, trailing only Marv Albert. 

Breen's average is in the neighborhood of 50 games a year, which would put him on pace to catch Albert's current mark (1,014 games) in the 2022-23 season. Of course, that's subject to the small matter that Albert is still an active NBA broadcaster doing about 40 games a year, but that in turn is subject to the fact that Albert turned 76½ last Tuesday. (Happy half-birthday, Marv.) Breen is 56.

Aside from Breen and Albert, Hubie Brown is the only person confirmed to have called 750 NBA games on national TV. Brown has 964 games under his belt. Craig Sager probably joins them: I have 746 sideline appearances for the man they called "America's sideline reporter," but that doesn't include courtside data for much of the 2006-07 or 2007-08 seasons, which means his total is more likely in the 800 range.

December 5 - The Rangers-Penguins affair from Pittsburgh marked the 800th time that the Broadway Blueshirts showed up on American national television. Only the Red Wings (870) and Flyers (829) have more such games.

(The Canadiens got their 500th American appearance on December 16, but I'm not giving that a full entry here because Canadian NHL telecasts have their own listings.)

December 8 - A Celtics-Spurs telecast from San Antonio is the 1,500th NBA game on record for ESPN. That figure includes 102 games from the cable network's first NBA contract (1982-84), but not the 60 games that have gotten shunted to other ESPN networks since 2002.

(For purposes of comparison, TNT's 2,500th game was Game 5 of the 2017 Eastern Conference Final; ABC's Christmas slate will start with game number 692 overall for them and game number 489 under the modern set of contracts.)

December 9 - Bob Cole, Canada's dean of hockey broadcasters, works his 1,700th NHL telecast as the Jets face the Lightning in Tampa. No other announcer in our five databases can boast even three-fourths of Cole's total, and the one that comes closest—Dick Irvin—retired in 1999.

December 11 - Lisa Salters becomes the 10th person to handle the sidelines for 100 NFL games when she works the Patriots-Dolphins Monday Night game for ESPN. (She also makes a lot of us wish we were in Miami in December, but that's beside the point.)

December 17 - The Vancouver Canucks become the first NHL expansion team to reach the national airwaves 1,000 times in Canada. They would likely prefer not to discuss the result of that game.

...and with that, we've caught back up.

In addition to the Kevin Harlan eclipse of Doug Collins mentioned earlier, the next several weeks figure to bring milestones for Ian Eagle, Dan Fouts, Greg Gumbel, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman. Reggie Miller, Mark Jackson, Hubie Brown; Mike Emrick, Pierre McGuire and Ed Olczyk; and Jim Hughson, Oake, Greg Millen, John Garrett and Paul Romanuk, should be on tap in the new year as well. 

Albert/Breen/Harlan/Stockton Sports Theater 3000

Having covered the NHL database already, tonight we'll take a look at updates to the database of every known regular-season and postseason NBA telecast.

(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 John Moynihan and Tim Brulia. And as always, you can see the top 16 in each category on our TV databases page.)

While I'm not convinced we have every NBA game ever in the list and there are still a sizable number of gaps (some 2.4 percent of the announcer data is uncertain), the data we have is ... what we have. Moreover, while I'm not convinced all of the guesses we have are correct, I do think it's fair to estimate off them -- for example, if a hypothetical network has a dozen doubleheaders over the course of a season, their lead and no. 2 crews probably worked about 12 games each that year.

Because of that uncertainty, however, I maintain two separate NBA lists: one that counts only the confirmed games and one that includes the hypotheses of Moynihan's original notes.

Regardless of your counting method, Monday night's Wizards-Pistons game on TNT is the 7,500th in the NBA database. Among those 7,500 games, 2,457 have come on TNT and another 1,456 on ESPN. NBC, the top-ranked broadcast network, has shown 967 tilts -- and I feel really old when I realize that "Roundball Rock" hasn't been on TV in almost five-eighths of my lifetime.

It probably won't surprise most of you to learn that the three most-televised teams are the Lakers, Celtics and Knicks, nor that Marv Albert checks in as the dean of NBA broadcasters with 995 appearances (994 on play-by-play, plus a color appearance alongside Chris Schenkel on ABC for a Knicks-Rockets game in 1973).

The top three PBP voices of all-time are currently active in the people of Albert, Mike Breen and Kevin Harlan; Dick Stockton, who may not have officially retired but hasn't appeared since 2015, is fourth. As of the end of the regular season tonight, those four announcers have handled a total of exactly 3,000 games.

Albert enters the playoffs five games and six PBP appearances shy of 1,000, a mark that only Bill Clement has reached on a single sport in the United States. Breen needs 21 games to reach 750.

On the analyst side, all-time leader Hubie Brown is two confirmed games shy of 950 and 25 total appearances, including guesses, away from 1000. Doug Collins follows him at 666 and 690 respectively. Jeff Van Gundy, the leader among those analysts whose careers started since the uncertain announcer data ends in 1993, is third overall with 545.

Reggie Miller needs eight more games to reach 400, all on color commentary, and 10 more to tie his sister Cheryl for the 13th-most appearances in league history. Mark Jackson enters the playoffs with 387 broadcasts, five behind Miller.

Following the passing of Craig Sager in December, David Aldridge's 262 confirmed broadcasts make him the longest-tenured sideline reporter in the playoffs, although he trails Doris Burke by 22 games if you include Burke's color work. Since we're missing a lot of sideline reporters from the 2006-07 and 2007-08 seasons, both individuals may well be shorted 40 games or so, but again ... we have what we have.

The regular season concludes tonight, leaving anywhere from 60 to 105 national telecasts in the playoffs that begin Saturday on ESPN, ABC, TNT and NBA TV.