In addition, the HNiC brand would be licensed to Rogers for Sportsnet-produced Saturday NHL broadcasts airing on CBC Television, as well as the Rogers-owned Citytv and Sportsnet outlets.

The program began broadcasting Saturday-night Toronto Maple Leafs games on November 12, 1931, over the Canadian National Railway radio network, of which CFCA was an affiliate.

[9] It featured the Maple Leafs and was hosted by Gordon Calder, with play-by-play announcer Hewitt and colour commentary by Percy Lesueur, in much of Ontario and points west.

The Nordiques, owned by Carling O'Keefe (a rival of HNIC sponsor Molson) with a small Anglophone fan base, were never broadcast from Quebec City during the regular season.

[19] We close tonight with what I said back in '87, [my] first time around at the helm of this broadcast, "Here's to an endless summer, and here's to an early fall ..." We will leave you congratulating the Los Angeles Kings with the music of Queen, and [we] bid you a good Hockey Night, for now.

However, CBC Sports' staff (including executive director Jeffrey Orridge) continued to insist on exclusivity for every Saturday-night game involving Canadian teams.

[21] The last CBC-produced Hockey Night broadcast aired on June 13, 2014, when the Los Angeles Kings clinched the Stanley Cup in a four-games-to-one final series over the New York Rangers, ending with a montage set to Queen's "The Show Must Go On" which included season and playoff highlights interspersed with images and sounds from the CBC's six decades of NHL coverage.

Stroumboulopoulos, an alumnus of Toronto sports radio station CJCL and host of a CBC talk show, was seen as an effort by Rogers to expand Hockey Night's appeal to a younger demographic.

Industry analysts reported that, despite the agreement's increased promotion of other CBC programming, the corporation might lose more advertising revenue during the Stanley Cup playoffs.

[42][43] Bob Cole retired in April 2019, and Don Cherry was fired after a November 9 incident during his "Coach's Corner" for comments that suggested Canadian immigrants benefit from the sacrifices of veterans but do not wear Remembrance poppies.

ET (7 p.m. PT, 8 p.m. MT) on the CBC and Sportsnet, originating from a Mountain or Pacific Time Zone city and usually featuring at least one of Western Canada's three teams: the Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers or Vancouver Canucks.

Since 2021–22, for Western Canada games, Harnarayan Singh, Louie DeBrusk, and Scott Oake are the lead broadcast team, while from 2016-2022, David Amber took over MacLean as host.

The afternoon broadcast of hockey-related features leads up to a triple-header of NHL games with the seven Canadian teams: the Calgary Flames, Edmonton Oilers, Montreal Canadiens, Ottawa Senators, Toronto Maple Leafs, Vancouver Canucks, and Winnipeg Jets.

The broadcast includes live segments from smaller communities across the country, and features panel discussions on issues facing "Canada's game" at the amateur and professional levels.

The telecast, based at the World Pond Hockey Championships in Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, featured NHL players playing an exhibition game to raise money for charities in Hamilton, Ontario.

HDIC simulcast a 2007 game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Vancouver Canucks on the TLN cable channel in Italian, with features and commentary by soccer host Alf De Blasis.

[79] It televised a 2010 game in the Inuit language Inuktitut, with commentary by CBC North's Charlie Panigoniak and Annie Ford,[80][81] and matches have been presented in Cree, Hindi, Punjabi, Tagalog, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese.

[80][82] The CBC broadcast one series per round during the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs in Mandarin, and added a regular-season schedule of games in Punjabi (Canada's third- and fifth-most-spoken languages, after English and French)[83] on the network's website and some cable and satellite providers.

[94][95] The Cree broadcast team is working to translate hockey terms such as "slapshot" (ᓱᐦᑭᐸᑲᒥᐍᐸᐦᐍᐤ sohki-pakamiwepahwew), "faceoff" (ᓇᐸᑭᐘᓂᐢ napakiwanis), and "rink" (ᓱᓂᐢᑿᑕᐦᐃᑫᐏᑲᒥᐠ soniskwatahikewikamik) into the language.

The network had also aired Quebec Nordiques and Ottawa Senators games occasionally during the regular season (if the Canadiens were not playing that night) and the Stanley Cup Finals.

The announcement angered Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, who suggested that the network was violating its licence conditions by not airing La Soirée du hockey.

The agreement was terminated after the 2004 playoffs,[99] but the RDS-produced replacement (Le Hockey du samedi soir) continued to be simulcast on Radio-Canada outside Quebec – where RDS has limited distribution – through the 2005–2006 season.

When HNIC was on radio, it was broadcast over several powerful CBC clear-channel stations whose nighttime signals reached much of the northern United States; the games had a following in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and New York, which also had NHL teams at the time.

This continued into the television era, waning in recent years with the expansion of local-team TV coverage on regional sports networks; some C-band satellite dishes, however, can still receive CBC over-the-air feeds.

From 2006 to 2021, the NBC networks (originally OLN and Versus) simulcast CBC coverage of some games (generally first- and second-round matchups from Western Canada) instead of using their own crews and announcers.

Previous show hosts included Wes McKnight, Ward Cornell, Frank Selke Jr., Jack Dennett, Dan Kelly, Ted Darling, Dave Hodge, Brian McFarlane, Don Cherry, Dick Irvin Jr., and George Stroumboulopoulos.

Chris Cuthbert, Harnarayan Singh and John Bartlett are the play-by-play announcers, and Craig Simpson, Louie DeBrusk, Garry Galley and Greg Millen are the color commentators.

The CBC devoted portions of its coverage to Geoffrion (including a pregame tribute and acknowledgements during the first intermission and on "Coach's Corner"), and the ceremony was broadcast in full by French-language outlets.

A CBC spokesperson said that the network received a "handful" of complaints about the lack of coverage; if the broadcaster aired the ceremony in full, it would have preempted the Leafs game for 40 minutes.

An Ottawa Citizen article considered the decision an example of perceived bias towards the Maple Leafs by the CBC, which did not want to "offend" their fans by not showing the full game.