NHL Coverage

The NHL has also made great strides in recent years when it comes to the coverage of the NHL, the players, games, and analysis. The NHL used to be covered by local channels of teams home cities as well as nationally by ESPN. The NHL is now cover exclusively by Verus and NBC today.

The NHL's television deal with Versus was made at the conclusion of the 2004–05 NHL lockout that caused the cancellation of an entire season. At the time, Versus offered a two year, $130 million contract (with a network option for a third year) that delivered guaranteed money for Commissioner Gary Bettman (ESPN, which previously held the rights, wanted a revenue-sharing deal similar to NBC's). Versus was expected to use NHL coverage to show it was a legitimate suitor for Major League Baseball and National Football League packages that were to be negotiated later in 2005, but they did not land agreements with either league. In 2007, the NHL signed an agreement to extend the NHL on Versus to the 2010–2011 season. Versus paid $72.5 million for 2007–2008 and will pay inflationary increases over the next three years.

In April 2011, NBC Sports and Versus announced they had reached a ten year extension to the television contract with the National Hockey League worth nearly 2 billion dollars over the life of the contract. As part of the announcement, the chairman of NBC Sports, Dick Ebersol announced that the Versus channel would be renamed "within 90 days", in order to reflect the synergy of the two networks after the Universal-Comcast merger.

On April 19, 2011, the league and NBC/Versus announced a new ten-year agreement. Beginning with the 2011–12 season, the terms of the agreement include:

• Versus (which will be renamed) will increase its regular season telecasts from 50 to 90.
• NBC Sports Group will have exclusive coverage of the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs beginning with the Conference Semifinals (2nd round). All games will air on one of the NBC Sports Group channels. This means that there will no longer be any local broadcasts after the first round.
• Exclusive American broadcaster of the Heritage Classic.
• Exclusive coverage of Games 3 and 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals.

Hockey Central
Versus also provides postgame coverage after every game they broadcast. The postgame show is known as Hockey Central, airing from their Stamford, Connecticut studios.