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NHL and NBC Sports Group sign 10-year broadcast deal

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With the NHL seeing revenues increasing each year and NHL fans coming back to the game and making it popular all over again, the expiration of the NHL’s TV deal with NBC and Versus at the end of this season brought about speculation about where the NHL might end up on the air in the future. After all, there was a lot of money to be had and to be made on the league with stars like Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin, and Patrick Kane to show off.

Today, the NHL signed a 10-year pact with NBC Sports Group to carry games on NBC and Versus and a deal that sees new and unprecedented coverage of the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs. Also, expect to see a lot more hockey on your television sets in the next ten years through the 2020-2021 season.

The expanded partnership, under which NBC remains the exclusive network home and VERSUS the exclusive cable home of the NHL in the U.S., is highlighted by the first-ever national distribution of all Stanley Cup Playoffs contests, including, for the first time, exclusive coverage starting with the Conference Semifinals. The agreement also calls for the NBC Sports Group to televise 100 regular season games per year and introduces a national NBC broadcast on Thanksgiving Friday.

Black Friday and New Year’s Day with big broadcasts? Happy Holidays to everyone.

Versus will now carry up to 90 exclusive broadcasts as well, a total that’s well up from this year and all previous seasons the NHL has been on Versus.

Also part of the deal is the continued coverage of the NHL All Star Game as well as the NHL Premiere Series in Europe, and NHL Faceoff on Versus. Versus will also have an exclusive national “Game of the Week” each week. From an NBC view of things, the Winter Classic and Hockey Day In America will continue as well. You can say that we’re rather excited about all of this.

The biggest part of the deal is that it means the NHL will be set on television for the next decade and with viewership growing and the numbers of fans increasing as well as the improvement of revenue for all teams across the board things are showing consistent improvement everywhere. The exclusivity offered by this deal for the NHL across the NBC networks helped make it a virtual no-brainer. We’re pretty sure the money helps too as rights fees will now be paid by NBC to carry the NHL. That wasn’t the case since the lockout as the NHL was essentially given a big favor by NBC to carry games coming out of the lockout in 2005.

We’re excited over here for obvious reasons. Getting to bring you all content from NBC and now Versus (which will be re-named in the next 90 days according to Dick Ebersol) from the studio talents like Keith Jones, Mike Milbury, and Jeremy Roenick is a huge thrill for us because, hey we’re fans too. Being a small cog in the machine that helps bring you all this great hockey stuff is a huge thrill for us and we’re happy to be along for the ride for (hopefully!) the next ten years.