They required a considerable amount of rehearsal with a four-way hook-up connecting the live commercial, Win Elliot's cage, the CBS studio, and the Garden's control room.
All of this necessitated instantaneous cueing by director Herbert Bayard Swope Jr.[7] The commercials from the Garden's other two sponsors, Ford and Maxwell House were decidedly less complicated to produce.
[27][28][29] According to the 1991 book Net Worth: Exploding the Myths of Pro Hockey, during the 1956-57 season, CBS broadcast ten games that were popular with viewers.
The four American franchises[30] at the time (the Boston Bruins, Chicago Black Hawks,[31] Detroit Red Wings and New York Rangers[32][33]) each received US$100,000.
[34] In 1963–64, CBS offered to broadcast an NHL Game of the Week on Saturdays during the National Football League season.
CBS started its weekly 1967–68 coverage[55] with the opening game (the Philadelphia Flyers vs. Los Angeles Kings) at The Forum in Inglewood, California on December 30.
[58][59] In a precursor to the "Heidi fiasco" on NBC a few months later, CBS decided that the game was over, the Hawks leading 3–0 with 50 seconds left, and went to a children's movie called The Goalkeeper Also Lives on Our Street.
Due to another strike by AFTRA (which resulted in the cancellation of a New York Rangers-Montreal broadcast last year), CBS started its playoff coverage with a CBC tape of the previous night's Boston-Montreal game.
On April 13, CBS started its three-week-long weekend afternoon Stanley Cup coverage, ending with the St. Louis-Montreal game 4 on May 11.
At about 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time, after the launch coverage was due to end, CBS would show the second and third periods of the game on tape delay.
For the CBS' Stanley Cup Finals coverage during this period, a third voice was added to the booth (Phil Esposito in 1971 and Harry Howell in 1972).
On January 7, 1973, CBS aired its first WHA game between the Minnesota Fighting Saints and Winnipeg Jets live from the new St. Paul Civic Center with Ron Oakes, Gerry Cheevers, and Dick Stockton announcing.
[75] Although the San Francisco Bay Area was not considered a particularly good hockey market, the terms of a new television agreement with a U.S. network (ultimately CBS) called for two of the expansion teams to be located in California.
[76] CBS was hoping that they would grow with the NHL by persuading them to go coast-to-coast (Montreal to Los Angeles) in a similar fashion for which they had grown with the National Football League (beginning in 1956).
In 1999, that goal was voted the greatest moment in NHL history by a panel of sportswriters who cover the league's clubs regularly.
The most commonly seen video clip of Bobby Orr's "flight" is the American version of the broadcast on CBS as called by Dan Kelly.
This archival clip can be considered a rarity, since about 98% of the time, any surviving kinescopes or videotapes of the actual telecasts of hockey games from this era usually emanate from CBC's coverage.
According to Dick Irvin Jr.'s book My 26 Stanley Cups (Irvin was in the CBC booth with Danny Gallivan during the 1970 Stanley Cup Finals), he was always curious why even the CBC typically uses the CBS replay of the Bobby Orr goal (with Dan Kelly's commentary) instead of Gallivan's call.
The explanation that Irvin received was that the CBC's master tape of the game (along with others) was thrown away to clear shelf space at the network.
The then-CBS affiliate in Boston, the old WNAC-TV, broadcast a local college hockey game that led into Sports Spectacular.
The network, the show, and their sponsors had a problem with the rink board advertising[102] that the NHL sold at Madison Square Garden, and refused to allow them to be shown on television.
As a result, CBS viewers were unable to see the far boards above the yellow kickplate, and could only see players' skates when the play moved to that side of the ice.
[106][107] CBS was mainly influenced by the United States men's Olympic hockey team's surprise gold medal victory (dubbed "The Miracle on Ice") in Lake Placid several months prior.
Given that the game went into overtime, CBS cut away from hockey during the intermission between the end of regulation and the start of overtime to present ten minutes of live golf coverage, with the golf announcers repeatedly mentioning that the network would return to hockey in time for the start of sudden-death.
Likewise, when Comcast opted not to renew its contract with the NHL in 2021, CBS did not make a serious effort to acquire the rights.