With NHL season around the corner, Sportsnet’s lineup has yet to take shape

It was supposed to be the future of hockey broadcasting. In the fall of 2014, as Rogers Communications kicked off its blockbuster $5.2-billion, 12-year deal with the NHL, company executives trumpeted all of the new ways they were going to make the game come alive for fans. There was a shiny $4.5-million studio, a hip host in George Stroumboulopoulos and a travelling carnival dubbed Hometown Hockey that would dispatch a small production army and Ron MacLean to a different remote corner of the country every week.

Most futuristic of all was GamePlus, an online service exclusive to Rogers customers that gave them access to a ref-cam, a sky-cam zipping end to end above the ice, various POV-cams (for those who wanted to watch players glaring at teammates on the bench), a single camera that would follow one star player each game and the ability to choose up to eight different replay angles.

The app was a sparkly showpiece for a telco with tech innovator aspirations. “It is the ultimate second-screen experience,” Keith Pelley, then-president of Rogers Media, told The Globe.

But the new (younger, female) audiences that Rogers had hoped to woo didn’t materialize and the old fans were turned off by the broadcasts’ flash, sizzle and supposed metrosexual modernity. By the third season, Strombo was gone and most of the other experiments were on their way to the trash heap, too.

As other broadcasters innovated – TNT in the U.S. brought in Wayne Gretzky and the mouthy Paul Bissonnette, and forced the on-air talent out of their chairs for demonstration segments – Rogers’s Sportsnet productions reverted to the mean, delivering meat-and-potatoes round table discussions of the games. Ratings went up and down depending almost entirely on the performance of the Canadian teams. It was unclear whether fans cared much at all what the broadcasts looked like.

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Two years ago, Amazon’s Prime streaming service began to target Canadian sports, scooping up exclusive sublicense rights from Rogers to a weekly national game on Monday nights and throwing gobs of money at league-friendly innovations, including new docu-series and a weekly whip-around highlights show. This year, Prime is making an even bigger splash, moving its exclusive national game coverage from Mondays to Wednesdays and taking some playoff series, too. Notably, with less than a month until puck drop, the very deep-pocketed streamer hasn’t announced its talent lineup for the new season.

Which may be why this week’s scuttlebutt that Kevin Bieksa and Elliotte Friedman apparently haven’t yet signed new contracts has caused such a stir. The pair are two of Sportsnet’s biggest stars: Friedman, the unmatched NHL insider who delivers trade and injury updates with the seriousness of Edward R. Murrow going after Sen. Joseph McCarthy; and Bieksa, the rare former player with charisma and the ability to speak articulately – and, more to the point, to do so knowledgeably on every aspect of the game, from on-ice tactics to dressing room chemistry.

Might they walk?

It’s late in the day to be inking contracts, though to be fair Rogers has had its hands full getting ready for the season, which will mark the beginning of its new $11-billion, 12-year deal with the NHL – and the first without the CBC-owned Hockey Night in Canada branding.

On Thursday, the company announced it had struck a deal to sublicense French-language rights for the 12-year term of the NHL deal to Quebecor’s TVA Sports service. That, too, was later than expected, given that the new season begins in a little under four weeks.

Other changes are beginning to leak out. One unconfirmed online report said analyst Jennifer Botterill may be moved from Saturday nights to Monday. (Sportsnet is not addressing any of the rumours.) Scott Oake, a long-time pillar of West Coast game coverage, retired at the end of last season.

Kelly Hrudey, a beloved long-time analyst, announced last month that Sportsnet had not renewed his contract, though he added that he was not retiring. Around the same time, Harnarayan Singh also announced that the network had ended Hockey Night in Punjabi, which had run on Rogers’s multicultural OMNI channel, evidently part of the same move to put all of its hockey broadcasts behind the Sportsnet paywall.

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Not only will NHL games no longer air on CBC – when that bombshell fell in June, CBC fans and nostalgists rent their garments, and CBC haters declared that now they really, truly, pinkie-swear wouldn’t watch the Communist Broadcasting Corporation ever again – they won’t even be on Rogers’s own CityTV channel. The company needs to drive as many subscriptions to Sportsnet as it can: sportsbooks may still be fighting for market share but their ads can’t cover that full $11-billion bill.

When the Bieksa and Friedman rumours hit the comment boards this week, fans insisted they wouldn’t pony up for a Sportsnet+ streaming package this season if the two aren’t re-signed.

They sounded a lot like the same folks who made a bunch of to-the-barricades declarations that they’d be cancelling Sportsnet after the company announced earlier this summer that it was raising the annual price from $250 to $270 for its standard service, and $325 to $345 for the package that includes out-of-market NHL games.

Are their threats real? History would suggest that depends almost entirely on whether their team is worth watching this year.