Twenty-Five National Television Announcer Milestones From Aug. 23 to Sept. 22

Somewhere around Aug. 23, it looks like we quit updating the Twitter feed as new announcer milestones got reached. That happened for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the unprecedented month-long convergence of all four major pro sports plus MLS.

The record-keeping hasn't stopped, though, and now we present a 24-pack of announcer milestones that happened since then. Plus a bonus one at the end because there were actually 25.

(I really should knock the dust off this blog more often rather than trying to compress everything into 280 characters on Twitter...)

Totals updated through the close of the day on Sept. 20, 2020, and also include Monday Night Football on Sept. 21.

1. August 24: Ed Olczyk becomes the sixth person to call 750 American national telecasts of National Hockey League games.

2. August 24: Pierre McGuire calls his 1,300th national NHL telecast between the U.S. and Canada. He's the second person to reach that milestone, trailing Bob Cole. Widening the scope to all four major professional sports, Cole and McGuire are joined in the 1300 club by Marv Albert and Dick Stockton (with Jim Hughson approaching).

3. August 24: McGuire's 1300th game between the U.S. and Canada was also his 909th American national telecast. That tied him with Mike Breen for the 11th-most in our records. (McGuire passed Breen outright with Canucks-Golden Knights on Aug. 25, although "passed" is relative because Breen is very much still active,)

4. August 25: With the Canucks-Golden Knights game, Louie DeBrusk makes his 204th appearance as an NHL colour commentator on a Canadian network. That ties Mickey Redmond for 15th in our records. DeBrusk completes the pass with his 205th game, Avalanche-Stars, the next day.

5. August 26: The Lightning-Bruins game was Olczyk's 750th American national telecast of an NHL game as a color commentator. (The difference between this and no. 1 is that the former listing includes two games as a sideline reporter.)

6. August 26: With Lightning-Bruins, Mike Emrick calls his 1,074th game on our overall master list — all three flavors of announcer, all four major pro sports, including Canada. That ties Harry Neale for 12th on that list. Emrick completes the pass when the two teams meet on Aug. 29.

7. August 26: The Flyers' game against the Islanders is the 894th time that team has appeared on an American network, matching the Red Wings for the most by an NHL team. Philadelphia completes the pass three days later.

8. August 29: The NBC hockey analyst of the present ties NBC's baseball analyst of a generation ago. Ed Olczyk analyzes his 766th game (Lightning-Bruins), matching the number of MLB telecasts with which Tony Kubek is credited. That's tied for 10th-most on our list of analysts across the U.S. and Canada. Edzo completes the pass with Flyers-Islanders the next night. (This milestone counts games on both sides of the international border. There is about to be another, similar milestone counting only U.S. telecasts.)

9. August 30: Baseball breaks into a list that has thus far been a bunch of hockey. Ron Darling becomes the tenth man to call 250 national MLB telecasts as an analyst when he breaks down the Yankees and Mets on TBS.

10. August 30: The Avalanche-Stars game double-dips on the milestone tracker. Kenny Albert calls his 300th NHL telecast for the United States, becoming the 13th person overall and seventh play-by-play announcer to reach that milestone. The game is also his 1,138th on the overall master list (all three flavors of announcer, all four major pro sports, including Canada), tying Scott Oake of Hockey Night in Canada for 10th place. Albert completes the pass of Oake later that night with Golden Knights-Canucks.

11. August 30: Sunday Night Baseball hits the City of Brotherly Love and Matt Vasgersian calls his 300th national MLB telecast as the play-by-play man. He's the 14th man to reach that plateau.

12. September 5: John Forslund becomes the fifth man to handle play-by-play of 350 NHL telecasts for an American national audience when he calls Islanders-Flyers. He's the 14th person to get there if you include Canada, and the 11th person to get to 350 American NHL games in any flavor of commentary.

13. September 5: With no regard for human life, the Nuggets-Lakers game is the 1,200th appearance by Kevin Harlan on our American master list (all three flavors of announcer, all four major pro sports, but not including Canada). All of those appearances are as the play-by-play announcer, and he's the third person to reach that milestone, behind Dick Stockton and Marv Albert. If you expand to Canada, he's fifth, also trailing Bob Cole and Jim Hughson. If you expand to color/colour commentators and include Canada, Pierre McGuire also tops him (see no. 2).

14. September 7: Craig Simpson calls his 850th NHL telecast in Canada, all as the colour commentator. The game in question is Islanders-Lightning. He's the third colour man to 850, trailing Harry Neale and Dick Irvin, and the eighth to 850 in Canada overall.

15. September 9: Jeff Van Gundy analyzes his 700th NBA national telecast, becoming the sixth person to broadcast 700 NBA games and the first person not named Hubie Brown to do color on that many.

16. September 11: John Forslund ties Dave Randorf for 13th on the NHL play-by-play list combining the U.S. and Canada. His 353rd game, bringing him level, is Lightning-Islanders on the 11th. His 354th game, completing the pass, is Golden Knights-Stars the next night.

17. September 11: Reggie Miller ties Mike Fratello for the fifth-most appearances on national television as an NBA game analyst, working his 517th game when the Nuggets play the Clippers. With the break between series, it takes him a week to finish the pass, until the 18th, by which time the Nuggets are playing the Lakers. Fratello was also holding down the no. 10 spot on the NBA's overall leaderboard, which Reggie now holds as well.

18. September 13: With her first NFL game of the season, Cardinals-49ers at Levi's Stadium, Laura Okmin passes Al Trautwig for 18th place on our master American sideline reporter list (all four major pro sports). The appearance is Okmin's 191st and also allows her to tie Tom Verducci for no. 17; she passes Verducci with the Rams-Eagles game a week later.

19. September 13: The leading lady of Sunday Night Football, Michele Tafoya, makes her 492nd appearance on our American sideline reporter list (all four major pro sports). That ties Jim Gray for fourth-most, trailing Craig Sager, Ken Rosenthal and Lisa Salters. Tafoya passes Gray a week later with Patriots-Seahawks.

20: September 14: Lisa Salters ties Bonnie Bernstein for the seventh-most sideline appearances in NFL TV records with her 141st on the Titans-Broncos game. She finishes the pass with the second week of Monday Night Football on Sept. 21.

21. September 15: Brian Boucher ties Joe Micheletti for sixth place on the American NHL analyst list with his 267th game. He passes Micheletti two days later. Both games are Islanders-Lightning.

22. September 17: Combining totals between the U.S. and Canada, Ed Olczyk ties former Hockey Night in Canada lead man Bill Hewitt with his 780th national telecast. Olczyk equalizes with the final Islanders-Lightning game, then passes Hewitt for 16th outright on Sept. 19 ... speaking of which ...

23. September 19: The opener of the Stanley Cup Final is Mike Emrick's 1050th game as a play-by-play announcer on our master list (all four major pro sports including Canada), He's the ninth person to get there.

24. September 22: With Game 3 of the NBA Western Conference Final, Brian Anderson calls his 116th national NBA telecast. That ties Dan Shulman for 16th among play-by-play announcers.

25. September 22: Rick Sutcliffe, ESPN's most experienced MLB analyst, calls his 576th national telecast; John Madden also called 576 national NFL telecasts during a career that spanned all four major broadcast networks from 1979-2008. The two men are tied for 12th on the analyst leaderboard across all four major pro sports and will be until Sutcliffe works again. Sutcliffe's total is also fourth-most among MLB color guys, falling in a big gap between Tony Kubek (766) and John Smoltz (398).

Regular Twitter service will now resume.

The Week That Was: May 19, 2019

Welcome to The Week That Was, a new feature at Un/Necessary Sports Research that solves all of our problems a couple of our problems.

First of all, there's fresh content on the blog side of things.

Second of all, the cable and Internet went out in our bunker (well, our below-street-level apartment) on Monday night before Trusty Laptop 2.0 passed into the great beyond on Thursday evening. All of our announcer data is backed up in the cloud, so that was never in danger, but we haven't been able to access it and tweet nuggets in almost a week.

Third, when we do tweet nuggets, they don't really get archived. (TW)^2 can serve as a one-stop shop for all that went down in the world of esoteric sports ... discoveries over the previous half of a fortnight.

So, as they say over at the Hydraulic Press Channel, with Trusty Laptop 3.0 acquired, here we go.

Sunday, May 12

• Craig Simpson ties Greg Millen for #8 on the Canadian NHL commentators list with his 783rd game, the second game of the Hurricanes-Bruins series.
• Ed Olczyk works his 700th American NHL national telecast in the same game 2. (Two of these were as a sideline reporter, setting up something on Thursday.)

Monday, May 13

• Kenny Albert handles play-by-play for his 1,050th American national telecast across the four major sports. At this time of the year, he's doing hockey, specifically game 2 of the Blues-Sharks series.
• Pierre McGuire makes his 821st appearance on a U.S. national telecast of the four major pro sports, matching Curt Gowdy for 14th-most all-time.

Tuesday, May 14

• Simpson passes Millen for #8 on the Canadian NHL commentators list with his 784th game in game 3 of the series.
• Simpson matches Tim McCarver with his 804th appearance as a color man on the four major pro sports. Only six men have more.
• Game 3 is Mike Emrick's 1000th American national telecast as a play-by-play announcer, encompassing every major pro sport except the NBA. He's the sixth person to reach this milestone.

Wednesday, May 15

• McGuire worked his 822nd game, passing Gowdy after tying him on Monday.

Thursday, May 16

• Simpson finishes the pass he started on Tuesday, eclipsing McCarver for seventh on the list of color men across all four sports.
• Olczyk works his 700th American national NHL telecast as a color commentator, becoming the third person to accomplish that behind McGuire and Bill Clement.

Friday, May 17

• The Red Sox played the Astros in a game that still sends up the "interleague" flag in my brain. Bob Costas, who remembers when the Astros didn't exist in either league, calls his 445th national MLB telecast, tying Dizzy Dean for #11 in our database.
• Garry Galley calls his 473rd national NHL telecast in Canada, matching John Garrett for the eighth-most by a color analyst.

Saturday, May 18

• Jeff Van Gundy calls his 650th national NBA telecast, all of them as a color analyst. He's the third analyst to reach that mark, trailing Doug Collins and Hubie Brown, and the seventh person overall.

Sunday, May 19

• Galley passes Garrett with his 474th appearance after having been tied since Friday.

The Week Ahead...

Below is the national broadcast schedule for the four major pro sports; MLS, the U.S. national soccer team; and major professional golf and tennis tournaments. Asterisks denote "if necessary" games.

Monday, May 20
8:00 -- MLBN -- Phillies at Cubs
9:00 -- ESPN -- Warriors at Blazers, game 4

Tuesday, May 21
7:00 -- ESPN -- Phillies at Cubs
8:00 -- NBCSN, CBC, SN -- Sharks at Blues, game 6
8:30 -- TNT -- Bucks at Raptors, game 4
9:45 -- ESPN -- Braves at Giants

Wednesday, May 22
9:00 -- ESPN -- *Blazers at Warriors, game 5

Thursday, May 23
1:00 -- French Open singles draws.
We get excited over tournament brackets. We will not apologize for this.
8:30 -- TNT -- Raptors at Bucks, game 5
9:00 -- NBCSN, CBC, SN1 -- Blues at Sharks, game 7

Friday, May 24
7:00 -- UniMas, UDN, Twitter -- Orlando City vs. Galaxy
9:00 -- ESPN -- *Warriors at Blazers, game 6
9:00 -- UniMas, UDN, Twitter -- Real Salt Lake vs. Atlanta United

Saturday, May 25
3:30 -- Univision, UDN, Twitter -- Fire vs. NYCFC
4:00 -- FS1 -- Diamondbacks at Giants
7:15 -- Fox regional -- Red Sox at Astros
7:15 -- Fox regional -- Dodgers at Pirates
7:15 -- Fox regional -- Braves at Cardinals
8:30 -- TNT -- *Bucks at Raptors, game 6

Sunday, May 26
5:00 a.m. -- Tennis Channel -- French Open, first round
12:00 -- ESPN -- USWNT vs. Mexico at Harrison, N.J.
12:00 -- NBC -- Indianapolis 500
Green flag at 12:45 after "Back Home Again in Indiana" at 12:36.
6:00 -- FS1 -- Sounders vs. Sporting Kansas City
7:00 -- ESPN or ESPN2 -- Braves at Cardinals
9:00 -- ESPN -- *Blazers at Warriors, game 7

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.

---

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.