NHL on Fox established hockey’s lasting U.S. network presence

Since the NHL on Fox premiered 25 springs ago, a once sparsely televised sport has never looked back with its American network presence.

If you cannot picture less than half a hockey season’s worth of weekend U.S. network telecasts, thank the NHL on Fox.

This spring marks 25 years since Fox did something its three towering competitors never had. The spry startup linked up with the league for a substantive slice of the regular season plus every playoff round.

Then the partners elongated the arrangement to five seasons.

They were five seasons of trial and error, to be sure. But given each party’s position in their respective fields, the NHL on Fox formed a perfect pairing at the time.

The resulting run was, on the whole, a worthwhile and very ’90s stretch of symbiotic, hip brand development. Since then, while it has gone to other networks, the NHL has been consistently presented on American terrestrial television.

For most of the North American sports Big Four’s existence, the NHL has been a decisive fourth-rate league. Born in 1986, Fox similarly trailed the established TV troika of ABC, CBS, and NBC.

Just as U.S.-based hockey teams sometimes latch on to their local brethren’s coattails for publicity, regional Fox affiliates have long carried one of their competitors’ local news hours.

But in the 20th century, none of the three senior networks could hold on to hockey if they wanted to. NBC carried only the NHL All-Star Game from 1990 to 1994. ABC televised homestretch games plus selected early-round playoff contests in 1993 and 1994. American fans thus needed cable to catch the Stanley Cup Final.

CBS covered some games in the more distant past, ending its last of many false starts in 1980. When it tried again for the 1994-95 season, the early-elementary-school-aged new kid on the block pulled an upset.

The deal was Fox Sports’ second great gain, following its first share of the NFL. As it happened, Fox NFL Sunday launched the week the network beat CBS as the NHL’s suitor.

Granted, the NHL was entering a lockout, which postponed its season opener to mid-January. But as the New York Times’ Richard Sandomir noted in his report on the deal, hockey was looking ripe for a renaissance.

The New York Rangers, the Original Six representative in the nation’s largest market, had just won the Stanley Cup. The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, Florida Panthers, and Dallas Stars were all coming off their first season. Wayne Gretzky was still thriving in Los Angeles, where he whet the Sun Belt’s appetite for the sport in the first place.

Two-plus months after those entities returned to action, Fox phased in its new unscripted program on April 2, 1995. It would occupy each of the 10 subsequent Sundays — four for the regular season and six for the first three rounds of the playoffs. Then it would split the shifts with ESPN for the championship series.

NHL on Fox makes its debut

To introduce the inaugural day of game coverage, a rapid-fire, mostly black-and-white montage of the league’s history filled 55 seconds. Then the screen’s script heralded “A new era for hockey…the fastest players on Earth… on the world’s most exciting network.”

The message gave way to the NHL on Fox logo, followed by the first shift of a theme score perfect for matinee hockey playing over a reel of contemporary highlights doctored for colorful and comic effect.

Vancouver’s Pavel Bure ignores the flames on his back as he navigates the Rangers backcheckers before his shot inflates en route to a rubber-armed Mike Richter’s mitt. Chicago’s Troy Murray upends a Maple Leaf who falls to blue shards on the ice.

Kings goaltender Kelly Hrudey’s trapper explodes as he ensnares Devils forward Claude Lemieux’s slapper. An Islander’s eyes bug out while his face flattens as he is pinned against the glass in the corner. Another Blackhawk biffs another unfortunate Toronto skater with explosive, smoky results.

For at least a couple of years, those who grimaced at these creative (if cheesy) liberties had tough luck. The network trying to cement its place in its own Big Four was setting the tone for its style. That tone would only visually crescendo for the NHL on Fox’s abbreviated rookie campaign and beyond.

A decade before Animation Domination took over the network’s Sunday nights, Fox tried to hook casual (and, presumably, young) hockey fans with cartoon robots. Throughout the telecast, a pair bearing each team’s logo made recurring appearances, starting with a ceremonial puck-drop.

Their primary cue, however, was each goal. They would grow out of their respective logos on the screen’s updated scoreboard graphic and stare down for a split second before the one representing the scoring team chose from a number of ways to reduce its opponent to a puck. At that point, it would slap the disc offscreen and glide after it, arms raised in triumph.

There was no shortage of that bot-on-bot brutality in the NHL on Fox’s first season finale. New Jersey’s 5-2 triumph over Detroit would be Fox’s only Cup-clinching game, and the highest-scoring clincher between 1993 and 2006.

Ticketholders started seeing gimmicks in person when the network reemerged at an arena near them the next winter. For the partnership’s second season, teams started using the national matinee telecasts to showcase their new “third” jerseys, many of which gained instant infamy.

Most notably, the Ducks debuted green threads with a leaping Wild Wing opposite L.A.’s teeth-gnashing, purple-bearded king. After that colorful contest, when pressed on the fashions by Los Angeles Times columnist Mike Penner, Gretzky charitably offered, “Uh, I liked them. I like the crest. It’s a little more creative than what we’ve been wearing.”

Regardless, both of those SoCal experiments were gone after 1995-96. Other alternate looks came and stuck for a while, for better or worse.

Back in the special-effects department, it took three seasons for FoxTrax to snuff out. One step beyond its quirky intro montages, the NHL on Fox presented fire on ice during select live games.

Through FoxTrax, the puck confirmed its location on the ice with mood-ring-like changes to reflect a pass or shot’s speed.

The idea was implicitly to make the action easier to follow for the game’s American laypeople. But Canadian fans with access to Fox were especially vocal in their opposition to the radiant rubber. So much so that University of Alberta professor Daniel S. Mason made it the nucleus of his report on the “Americanization” of Canadian treasures.

The end of NHL on Fox

The sizzling stunt was over by the summer of 1998. By that point, Fox knew its status as the NHL’s terrestrial network would soon be finished too. ABC, a sister station of America’s then-NHL cable abode, ESPN, had inked a deal to take over in 2000.

While overeager hype-mongers touted a “new millennium” that would neither start for another two years nor precipitate that much upheaval, the NHL on Fox modified its vibe. For the lame-duck campaign, the robots receded alongside the glowing pucks and overwhelming third threads.

The network’s last regular-season shift coincided with Gretzky’s valedictory game with the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. The hockey world stood still for the preceding ceremonies, as participants and spectators at coinciding contests watched the coverage on the jumbotron or in their locker room.

After more Sunday matinees throughout the first three playoff rounds, then the three Stanley Cup Final games played at primetime in Dallas, Fox’s puck party was over as well. A precautionary parting montage after Game 5 proved prudent when ESPN covered its fourth consecutive season finale in Game 6.

One breakthrough ABC enjoyed as a three-letter network was a string of consecutive Cup-clincher telecasts. Whereas Fox and ESPN rotated throughout every mid-to-late-’90s final, the cable channel ceded Games 3 through 7 to its sibling from 2000 to 2004.

With that said, ABC pumped less pizzazz into its telecasts. Whether that helped or hurt its cause is more debatable than the timing of its five-year NHL run. That stretch constituted the entire interlude between The Great One’s (Gretzky) retirement and The Next One’s (Sidney Crosby) debut.

At least Crosby was available, along with Alex Ovechkin and other fresh prodigies, when the Outdoor Life Network tried to get viewers used to its status as the NHL’s new U.S. cable outlet. Both of the two reigning No. 1 draft picks were also in midseason form when NBC’s new era began in January of 2006.

Apart from OLN’s two relaunches as Versus and the NBC Sports Network, little has changed since. Well, except for the New Year’s Day Winter Classic and then the Black Friday Thanksgiving Showdown taking the starting-point role once played by the All-Star Game.

Or, for that matter, a post-Vernal Equinox homestretch contest.

As for Fox, fans in participating markets can still hear a slight remix of that top-shelf matinee-hockey composition during regional telecasts. Whether it would still play on the national level today is tough to imagine.

Tune in to any Fox Sports telecast, either on the main network or FS1, and you will hear NFL music. That goes for Major League Baseball (which once had its own theme), NASCAR, and (with a marching-band spin) college football.

Not that it matters much. NBC is coming off 15 full or partial (i.e. lockout-shortened or pandemic-halted) consecutive seasons of NHL coverage. It has covered each of the last 14 Cup clinchers, and has at least two more years yet to come.

And to think that, 25-to-30 years ago, the puck was too cold for NBC to handle beyond the All-Star Game. If Fox can say nothing else, it warmed up the product for its elder rivals to grip with authority throughout this century.

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