Hockey’s trade deadline, set for 3 p.m. (all times Eastern) involves the country’s two biggest sports networks, Sportsnet and TSN, against each other in live competition.
The band is getting back together at TSN.
Among the tricks the sports network used to sustain interest in the doldrums of last year's day-long NHL trade deadline broadcast were interludes where musician Lester McLean strummed a guitar and sang songs about players and deals. When Calgary Flames president Brian Burke beamed in for an interview, McLean serenaded the gruff executive.
"Oh, we've been watching and trust me, he's the highlight so far," Burke quipped to host James Duthie.
Hockey's trade deadline, set for 3 p.m. (all times Eastern) on Monday this year, is a broadcasting oddity. Over the past decade it has grown into an all-day spectacle with dozens of hosts, analysts, former players and executives minutely dissecting even the most minor swap of a spare defenceman for a minor-league forward. And its expansion can be traced, at least in part, to the singular way it pits the country's two biggest sports networks, Sportsnet and TSN, against each other in live competition.
There is undoubtedly an audience. But more often than not, the viewer's appetite for action has far exceeded what's on offer. General managers have been pulling the trigger earlier, sealing deals outside the pressure cooker of the deadline, and last-minute blockbusters are getting fewer and farther between. As a result, the appeal is increasingly in the unscripted moments when hosts take phone calls on-air or crack jokes off the cuff. It's drama, but delivered with a wink.
So McLean and his guitar will be back in studio again on Monday for another deadline-day marathon.
"It's almost become a parody of itself, and we realize that it's silly, but we still love it," Duthie said of the coverage. "I said to my bosses a couple of years ago, this is the only event that we hype more every year and it delivers less and less."
What began years ago as a series of updates interrupting regular programming morphed into an hour-long special, then grew to four hours, and kept expanding. Today, both Sportsnet and TSN have blocked off 10 straight hours of live coverage. And they are throwing as much firepower as ever at the day, firm in the belief that it is circled in hard-core fans' calendars – "because TV made it that way," said Gord Cutler, senior vice-president of NHL production for Rogers Media, the parent company of Sportsnet.
They're not wrong. At any given moment on last year's deadline day, more than 300,000 people were watching the two networks on TV, and that's not counting those streaming the broadcast online to sneak a peek while at work. Most were aged 18 to 49 and, anecdotally, some even called in sick to stay home and watch. Four million viewers tuned in to the two broadcasts at some point to see 20 trades involving 38 players. And yes, Martin St. Louis was dealt, but for the most part a series of unknowns such as Calle Jarnkrok or Matt Taormina traded places.
"It basically became our equivalent of election night," said Mark Milliere, senior vice-president of production for TSN. "Like an election, we just kept adding analysts."
The first trade isn't usually sealed until around 11 a.m., but the networks both hit the air at 8 a.m., with radio shows setting the stage hours earlier. Each will have dozens of analysts and reporters at the ready, who will spend much of the day waiting, speculating and working the phones for any nugget of news.
The wisdom of wall-to-wall deadline coverage is up for debate. TSN has been the ratings leader by a wide margin for the past five years, drawing an average audience ranging from 187,000 to 256,000 viewers – three to four times Sportsnet's averages of between 60,000 and 97,000. The program has become so much a part of TSN's DNA that when it built its current studio in Agincourt, Ont., "very much in our mind was … how will this look on trade deadline day?" Mr. Milliere said.
His rival seems more skeptical. "I don't necessarily believe that the networks need to be on all day, but that's a legacy piece that's existed for the last number of years," Cutler said. "It's like a national holiday."
Still, the competitive fires are stoked again, this year more than usual, as Sportsnet looks to narrow the gap. After inking a 12-year, $5.2-billion deal to become the NHL's national broadcast partner, it enters the day with a new studio, a larger and more loyal hockey audience and an expanded on-air roster.
"It's our first year where there wasn't that feeling of being the underdog," said host Daren Millard, who anchors Sportsnet's coverage on Monday. "There's a real renewed excitement about this trade deadline from our group as a team that, in a large part, has gone through a trade deadline themselves and been assembled in the last year."
The way the networks cover the deadline is also changing. More people are keeping tabs online and on smartphones – the 2014 edition was among the biggest days for digital traffic at both networks – and social media has become an influential intermediary. Teams and players now often break trades on Twitter, beating network insiders to the punch.
Once news is out, the social network is "sort of like the soundtrack to these moments," said Christopher Doyle, director of media partnerships for Twitter Canada. Last week's trade that sent struggling Maple Leaf forward David Clarkson to Columbus – an intriguing deal but hardly a kingmaker – generated 190 tweets a minute as interest peaked.
As a result, "the breaking of a trade has become less important to responding, to how you analyze the trade," Millard said.
The networks are still sometimes the first ones to tell a player he's been dealt, and the reactions can be deeply human. "You do [have to] remember that lives get changed, that kids get pulled out of school and wives are crying, and it is tough on the players," Duthie said.
Household names such as Evander Kane and Jaromir Jagr changed clubs early this year, whittling TSN's list of the top trade bait to the likes of Jeff Petry and Zbynek Michalek. But even the remote potential that a star could be packing his bags for the right price – a Phil Kessel or Taylor Hall – can generate a thirst for hockey talk, which is currency to sports networks.
"The reality is, if we had no trades at all, we could still fill the 10 hours," Duthie said. "It's all about the possibilities, right?"
James Bradshaw