NHL On ABC - Before The 1992–93 NHL Season

Before The 1992–93 NHL Season

After being dropped by NBC after the 1974–75 season, the NHL had no national television contract in the United States. In response to this, the league put together a network of independent stations covering approximately 55% of the country.

Games typically aired on Monday nights (beginning at 8:00 p.m. ET) or Saturday afternoons. The package was offered to local stations with no rights fee. Profits would be derived from the advertising, which was about evenly split between the network and the local station. The Monday night games were often billed as The NHL Game of the Week. Viewers in New York City, Buffalo, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Los Angeles got the Game of the Week on a different channel than their local team's games. Therefore, whenever a team had a “home” game, the NHL Network aired the home team's broadcast rather than their own.

Initially, the Monday night package was marketed to ABC affiliates; the idea being that ABC carried Monday-night NFL football in the fall and (starting in May 1976) Monday-night Major League Baseball in the spring and summer, stations would want hockey to create a year-round Monday night sports block. But very few ABC stations picked up the package.

In 1979, ABC was contracted to televise Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals. Since the Finals ended in five games, the contract was void. Had there been a seventh game, then Bob Wilson would have called play-by-play alongside Jim McKay (between-periods host), Bobby Clarke (color commentator), and Frank Gifford (reporter, who would have been in the winning team's dressing room to interview players and coaches as well as hand the phone to the winning team's coach that that would have allowed him to talk to both President Jimmy Carter and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau). The game would have started at 5:10 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on a Saturday, replacing Wide World of Sports and local news shows that typically followed it on ABC stations in the Eastern and Central time zones.