How TSN raised its monster

in Buffalo, N.Y.

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 truck 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?