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Events and Attractions

Returning to hockey, ESPN finds new technology to play with

The first game of the 2016 World Cup of Hockey marked the return of not only the tournament, which was last played in 2004, but also of the NHL to ESPN, whose last league-sanctioned broadcast was that 2004 final.

Awarded the rights in March 2015, ESPN started to put a production team together for the tournament about eight months ago, said Bill Graff, senior coordinating producer in ESPN’s studio production department. Graff, who is overseeing more than 50 hours of tournament coverage, was a producer for the network during its previous NHL coverage as well as for multiple FIFA World Cups.

“We have plenty of experience doing World Cup-type events with world feeds and augmenting them, so doing this event was very much in line for us,” Graff said from one of the network’s trailers sitting just outside of the Air Canada Centre. “But at the same time it was a bit of a challenge because there are a lot of things on the sports calendar and we wanted to make sure we could create some new things for fans — except the music, because we love our [“National Hockey Night”] music.”

Graff said little has changed in the game of hockey over 12 years from a production standpoint, but the introduction of technology and visual enhancements has particularly excited the ESPN team.

For the World Cup of Hockey, the NHL and NHLPA worked with Sportvision to provide player- and puck-tracking technology for television broadcasts the first time in a competitive game (the technology was first tested in the 2015 NHL All-Star Game). Using Sportvision’s infrared tracking system embedded in pucks and on player jerseys, data like skating speed, player location, distance traveled and puck trajectory have been made available to broadcasters for in-game replay and studio reports as well as live broadcast. ESPN is taking Rogers Sportsnet’s 31-camera world feed for the tournament and adding more cameras in the arena, and has data and graphics made available to the broadcast via Sportvision.

Intermissions and studio shows are being anchored from a studio in Bristol, Conn.

“One of the biggest challenges with hockey on television is capturing the speed of the game, and while we try to capture that with better cameras and better camera positions, now you have the opportunity to really see the numbers associated with that speed, and it’s really impressive,” Graff said.

He noted that even though it was early on in the tournament, the network had already used several Sportvision elements. The feature Graff thought added perhaps the best value to the broadcast was the live tracking of players, which could be used in a box during live action showing current line pairings and time-on-ice.

ESPN has been working with Sportvision for the last four months on best practices for the elements, and the league also has provided it with a working template. “Since the tournament began, we’ve been meeting with them almost every day — discussing where we can use elements and where we can expand things,” he said.

While Graff said that because of the short nature of the two-week tournament the network likely would stick mostly to comparative stats as opposed to trying to introduce metrics that perhaps need more explanation, he said the tools not only could serve as sources of information for avid hockey fans but hopefully open the doors for new fans.

“There was a goal in an earlier game where you saw the Sweden national team space themselves perfectly apart to set up a tic-tac-toe pass, and using the Sportvision tool it allowed our analysts to not only show the distance between players, but also say, ‘OK, that’s what they were thinking and why they did it,’” he said. “It becomes a coaching tool for fans, really helping them understand the game and hopefully wanting to learn more.”

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