TSN team credits coverage success to quality of hockey
How TSN raised its monster
Tucked in beside a plain office building in the parking lot at New Era Field sits the production truck that is the operational brain of TSN’s hockey broadcast.
With the stadium itself looming above on a frigid winter day, the truck is at once cosy, but also more than a little tense. The production team works in a tight space, calling out camera angles and replays and graphics in front of a wall of monitors that provide more than two dozen feeds.
During a break in the action of the Canada- United States game, they cut to a clip that was shot earlier that afternoon: TSN analyst Ray Ferraro trying out the makeshift outdoor rink. Ferraro, in suit pants and skates, snaps a wrist shot into the top corner. Gord Miller, his partner in the TSN booth, has a line holstered: ” Nice to see you finally score a goal at the world juniors,” he says.
The production t ruck erupts in shouts and cheers. Ferraro, despite a 108- goal season with the Brandon Wheat Kings — not a typo — did not make Canada’s world junior team. After a few more chuckles among the men crouched in front of replay monitors, it’s back to the constant motion of a live hockey broadcast, several dozen people either barking instructions or receiving them.
The moment is instructive in that the crew’s reaction to Miller’s poke is the kind of thing you see among friends: the tease that would be an insult to an outsider, but is a friendly jibe to someone familiar, even if this one just happened on national television. The crew reacts like a tight-knit group because circumstances have conspired to make them one. The guys in the truck, plus Miller and Ferraro and a small army of TSN employees, spend every Christmas season together in places like Ufa, Russia, and Malmo, Sweden, and now Buffalo, N.Y.
In the 25 years since TSN acquired the broadcast rights to the world juniors, it has evolved from a low-key curiosity to one of the biggest tentpole events in Canadian sports programming. In conversations with various TSN people over a couple of days in Buffalo last week, the same phrase comes up again and again: they have created a monster. And so Miller, Ferraro and the rest of TSN’s top crew gather annually to showcase the work of essentially a bunch of teenagers. Millions of Canadians — and hockey fans in Europe — will watch them do it.
So how did TSN create this beast?
Paul Graham was around at t he start. When TSN bought the rights to the world juniors before the 1991 tournament, it was the broadcasting equivalent of a speculative mining stock.
Games at the world juniors had rarely been shown live, and the only moment with which anyone was familiar was the brawl between Canada and the Soviets a few years earlier. TSN started off showing just five games in the tournament — it was just a round robin then — and the following year, in Fussen, in Germany’s Bavarian region, Graham says the crowds were at least dozens strong. The Soviet team had to get new uniforms as the tournament went on, as the USSR had officially dissolved. The Commonwealth of Independent States still won gold.
In t h os e early years, t hough, t he t ournament games were a rare bit of live television at that time of year on TSN.
“There was a time at our network where basically everyone went on vacation except the guys doing the world juniors,” says Graham, now TSN’s vice president and executive producer of live events.
SportsCentre — then called SportsDesk — mostly showed year in review- type stuff and canned highlight packages.
By the end of that decade, TSN started to put its full might behind the tournament sending a much larger crew, making live world jun- iors content a big part of the daily news shows, and telling the stories of not just the Canadian team but the NHL prospects from different countries.
“Then it expanded into a promotional, marketing and business thing where really the whole network got involved,” Graham says. “There was a time in the mid-’ 90s where it was just this merry band of people who would miss Christmas and do the tournament somewhere in Europe.”
Miller has been part of that merry band since 1993.
“It was a nice little tournament played in small rinks,” he says.
The challenge for a playby-play guy was you couldn’t find out names of the players on half the teams.
“Teams would show up without names on t heir sweaters, and with mismatched equipment.”
But Miller also pushes back at the notion the growth of the tournament is entirely a made- by-TSN thing.
“You have to have a good product,” says Miller, who was joined in the booth by Ferraro for the Alberta edition of the tournament six years ago. “Ray turned to me at that tournament in Calgary in 2012 and said, ‘ This is unreal hockey,’ and I said it was like that every year, because it is.”
Ferraro says the emotion of the players is a huge sell- ing point, and not just those who already have milliondollar NHL contracts. He points to the 2015 performance of Slovak goalie Denis Godla, who performed feats of magic in the bronze-medal game in Toronto. “The building was chanting his name and you are like, ‘ This is as good as it’s going to get.’ He’s going to go back home and he’s going to have a pro career, but he’s 19 years old and there are 15,000 people chanting his name. It was astounding.” ( Godla now plays in the Finnish elite league.)
Good product or not, TSN’s influence on the tournament’s growth cannot be denied. Consider it has for a decade now been the host broadcaster for the world juniors, even when they are played across the Atlantic Ocean. In that role, it is intimately involved in all aspects of the tournament. It makes all the decisions about television production, whether in Sweden or the Czech Republic or Canada, and provides the feeds used by international broadcasters. Because TSN produces all 31 games, that means those networks can show their home team start to finish.
“When you go to Sweden and Finland and Russia and see how much passion there is for it, it’s amazing,” Miller says.
Two years ago, when Finland won gold in Helsinki, the reported television audience was 2.5 million. Finland has a population of about 5.5 million. In Canada, the games routinely draw average audiences of well over a million viewers, even when they are played overseas.
The outdoor game averaged 2.7 million viewers — in line with last year’s Canadian audience for the Stanley Cup Finals — and the world juniors outdrew Hockey Night in Canada on Saturday night and a Toronto Maple Leafs game on Thursday, according to TSN.
What you think of this growth depends on how you feel about the Canadian tendency to group national identity and hockey together. But, the same factors that helped drive the growth of the WJC in Canada — the annual holiday schedule, with games taking place while extended families are at home and not at work — have helped drive it elsewhere.
“Finnish TV showed pictures of downtown Helsinki during that game, and it was deserted,” Miller says.
Back in the production truck, the team is in high gear, like a well- coordinated breakout. When Canada scores, director Andy Bouyoukos calls out different camera angles to catch the reaction, then the celebration, then the American reaction, while producer Chris Edwards looks at the replay options collected by video operators behind a divider in the truck. Within seconds he has a series of replays lined up.
Later, when Ferraro notices a shot from before the game showed sunny conditions, he suggests comparing it to t he current blizzard. By the time the minute- long commercial is over, the images are queued, and Ferraro narrates them coming out of the break. It’s the kind of production one could expect of an NHL playoff game, which is how Graham says TSN treats this tournament. One involving, it bears repeating, teenagers.
Analyst Bob McKenzie was there in Gavle, Sweden, when the games “were in front of friends and family.”
The growth is obvious — we are speaking as more than 44,500 people have just watched a world juniors game in the snow — but McKenzie says “you can talk about how it’s dressed up and all that, but still, at a basic level, it’s all about the hockey.”
It is, he notes, the only annual best- on- best tournament.
“And the hockey always ends up selling it, for me.”
“I think the coolest thing for me at this tournament is just watching how much it means to these kids,” Ferraro says. “It might sound corny, but how hard they try. You look at their faces, and they are just babies. But they leave everything out there. They’ve got nothing left. And I just love it.”
That, plus some good timing, equals a monster.