- Sportsnet’s Saturday Night Hockey made its debut on the first Saturday of the NHL season
- CBC didn’t air an NHL game on a Saturday night for the first time since 1952
- Read below for how fans reacted and what CBC put on instead
Canadian hockey fans spent the first Saturday of the NHL season getting used to a new name. Plenty of them aren’t having it.
Sportsnet debuted “Saturday Night Hockey” on Oct. 3, the rebranded version of its marquee broadcast now that the NHL is no longer part of Hockey Night in Canada. It was the first Saturday since 1952 that CBC didn’t carry an NHL game.
Reaction online came fast. One fan summed up the mood with a skeleton waiting on the couch:
Others went straight to the nostalgia. Jennifer Chefero wrote about what the Saturday broadcast meant to her growing up:
What made it sting a little more was what CBC aired in the old slot. The public broadcaster showed the Canada Super60 Cricket League at 7 p.m. ET, the window that used to belong to Hockey Night’s primetime game.
Saturday’s broadcast itself didn’t look all that different. Ron MacLean hosted the panel with Kevin Bieksa, Elliotte Friedman and Colby Armstrong, and the four-game opening slate had Ottawa at Toronto, Montreal at Pittsburgh, Seattle at Edmonton and Calgary at Vancouver.
Plenty of viewers still refused to call it anything else:
That split goes back to June. Rogers and CBC couldn’t agree on a new sublicensing deal, so the NHL games left CBC while the Hockey Night in Canada trademark stayed with the public broadcaster.
This season is also the first year of Rogers’ new 12-year, $11 billion national rights deal with the league.
Hockey Night in Canada isn’t gone, either. CBC brought the brand back with the PWHL last month, with eight primetime Saturday games starting Dec. 5 when the Montreal Victoire host PWHL Hamilton.
Every one of those games will feature a Canadian team. For NHL fans, though, Saturday nights now belong to Sportsnet, whatever they end up calling it.
