More Teams, More Stories For This Year’s Road to The NHL Winter Classics

Once again Ross Greenburg is at the helm of producing the “Road to the NHL’s Outdoor Winter Classics.” A rousing success last year, this year’s version is a little different – there will be four teams competing instead of two – which means for Greenburg and his all-star crew are tasked with twice the amount work resulting in twice the amount great stories.

Sidebar. Truth be told when I did my final graduate school thesis a little over a decade ago, I  focused on the beginning and ultimate importance of NFL Films. It was an effort that resulted in me wanting to live at the epicenter of sports and technology. What the late Ed and Steve Sabol were able to do in terms of elevating the caliber of behind-the-scenes story lines- extracting content from microphones and cameras on the field and its sidelines – changed the way we watch sports forever. It was an exercise that made my NFL fandom run deeper and it made me realize an amazing truth:

Technology, when done right, makes sports so much better. Technology in the hands of the best story tellers in sports, creates a certain genius.

“As Steve Sabol said on the set on the first Hard Knocks we every did and they (HBO) asked ‘well how are you guys going to put this together.’ “says Greenburg, who served as President of HBO from 2000-2011 after a 15-year run as their Executive Producer. “Steve said it’s sort of like building the plane mid-flight. So now we’re just building the bigger plane.”

In a sports world saturated with “embracing debate,” scorching hot takes and engagement through social media, Greenburg continues to carry on the mission buy building great television. It’s a mission he himself has been on since the 1970s, when he was a production assistant at HBO. Greenburg would climb from production assistant all the way to President gobbling up 51 sports Emmys in the process. His offering to the NFL, the gritty behind the scenes “Hard Knocks” is simply the best watch in sports television programming. Thankfully he’s taken that model and created Ross Greenburg Productions, where he can put a talented crew together to work on projects like this with the NHL.

“This has been tougher because the amount of work load. We have four dedicated edit teams assigned to each team,” Greenburg says. “We’re actually turning these shows around in six or seven days. There’s a focus and an intensity that probably doesn’t exist in any other form of television to this degree because the end product does look like it’s been in the edit room for six months.”

True to form hockey fans can expect in-depth look at Chicago Blackhawks stars Corey Crawford and Patrick Kane and a trip home for the holidays for Toronto’s Auston Matthews. Also, the production team followed around St. Louis Blues coach Ken Hitchcock to get a look at what the veteran coach is like off the ice.

To me, Mr. Greenburg’s work is critical to the games we all love. The gems captured from in-game microphones and the chatter picked up behind the scenes give us an unmatched entryway to the players and the game.

“It’s been a lot of fun,” Greenburg says. “We’re not reinventing the wheel here, but Steve and I worked really hard to forge this kind of programming and we’re seizing the moment.”