As expected, Mike Milbury’s run at NBC Sports is over.
NBC said in a statement Monday that Milbury, its longtime NHL studio and game analyst, will not be returning this season: “We are grateful to Mike for all of his contributions to our coverage for 14 years, but he will not be returning to our NHL announce team. We wish him well.”
Milbury joined NBC in 2007 and had been its lead studio analyst for his entire tenure. He had also become a regular game analyst in recent years and was one of the few NBC broadcasters on-site during the NHL’s resumption of play last summer.
It was during the restart that Milbury set his exit in motion. Discussing the benefits of the NHL “bubble” during an early round playoff game, he joked that there were no women around to “disrupt [the players’] concentration.” He apologized for the comment but was pulled from his next assignment and then opted out of the remainder of the postseason.
With Milbury’s exit, NBC’s studio analysts this season will include the returning Keith Jones, Anson Carter and Patrick Sharp, as well as newcomers Mike Babcock, Ryan Callahan and Dominic Moore.
Milbury is NBC’s second long-tenured studio analyst to exit under fire in the past year. NBC fired Jeremy Roenick last February after he made suggestive comments about colleagues during a podcast, ending his decade-long run.
In related news, as first reported by the New York Post, NBC did not name a lead play-by-play voice to replace the retired Mike Emrick. The network said Kenny Albert, Brendan Burke and John Forslund will “headline” its play-by-play roster, with Eddie Olczyk, Brian Boucher, Pierre McGuire and AJ Mleczko as its main analysts.
Albert and McGuire are scheduled to work NBC’s first game of the new season on Wednesday (Penguins-Flyers, 5:30 PM ET), followed by Forslund, Olczyk and Boucher (Blackhawks-Lightning, 8 PM) and Burke and Mleczko (Blues-Avalanche, 10:30 PM). As has become the norm over the past year, some games will be called remotely.
[News from NBC Sports]
