Mad Mike Lands at NBC

Neil Best of Newsday reported yesterday that Mike Milbury will be replacing Brett Hull on the NHL on NBC broadcasts this January. Great job for Milbury because the guy was freaking great working for ESPN in the nineties. I still remember this report he did during the 1994 lockout about NHLers from Russia and hardships that a lot of the guys came from, etc. It was just a visually stunning piece as he was live in Russia so he was able to show a lot of the local landscape and whatnot and even touched on the entire vodka aspect of life in the former Soviet Union. At the time, Russians in the NHL was just sort of an emerging phenomenon and as a young man, it was sort of wake-up call for me because it made you respect just what the athletes had to go through to get here to North America.

Replacing Brett Hull on the telecasts shouldn't be hard. For all of the hype around Hullie, the only memorable part of his time at NBC was the overwhelming feeling that he didn't get along with Ray Ferraro or Bill Clement. I don't want to go as far as to say that he didn't respect them...but Hull really came off like...you know...he didn't respect them. No big loss there.