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The World Cup of Hockey, to be exact.

Yesterday, news broke that ESPN will be the American broadcast rights holder of apparently a thing again, the World Cup of Hockey – an event which falls under Gary Bettman’s Shield – in 2016. They beat out NBC and FOX for the rights. And of course still-league-partner NBC is pissed about it:

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Nice work.

This is big news. Hockey was at its best on ESPN. Despite all of the fair gripes about the network, there’s no denying that they’re the biggest, most powerful and influential media entity in sports. Their shameless hype machine takes events to entirely new heights. Hockey vanished from the national conscious the minute it left the network. NBC has done a good – even great – job with the sport, but unlike football – with which NBC can blur the line between sports and pop culture through Today Show segments and the other myriad cross-promotions – hockey hardly gets any promotional support from the networks of NBC and other Comcast megalord properties. The World Cup airing on ESPN will, at the very least, make hockey the focus of the sports world for a month… or for a few weekdays between NFL games. Either way, GET ME MY GARY THORNE AND BILL CLEMENT: