A league source has confirmed that longtime NHL player-turned-broadcaster Eddie Olczyk will be joining the ROOT Sports booth for Kraken games this coming season alongside play-by-play man John Forslund, whom he's paired with on national telecasts throughout the years.
Olczyk, 55, a member of the U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame and a brother of Kraken assistant general manager Ricky Olczyk, will be part of a new three-man booth alongside Forslund and current on-air analyst JT Brown. Also, the plan is to have Olczyk fulfill his full national broadcast schedule with TNT, meaning he won't be available for all Kraken games and might not start the season off with the ROOT Sports crew.
Olczyk will also be doing additional work for the team and network, including recorded video segments and profiles.
The Chicago Sun Times first reported that Olczyk would be joining the Kraken broadcasts after doing analysis locally on games for his former Chicago Blackhawks squad the past 15 years. The team put out a statement Monday afternoon thanking Olcyzk for his contributions.
"We are going to miss him as much as our fans will," it stated.
The Kraken have yet to release any statement confirming Olczyk's hiring.
Talks with the Blackhawks at renewing Olczyk's deal, which expired June 30, slowed in recent weeks. Multiple sources close to the situation said talks with the Kraken began last month, at which time it was decided the team would keep Brown if Olczyk was to join the broadcast.
Brown, also a former NHL player, joined the Kraken broadcasts last year with almost no on-air experience other than giving interviews and team officials were said to be pleased with his progress and the audience connection he made.
Olczyk's arrival should nonetheless help bolster the broadcasts, which started off garnering very high ratings last season before quickly plummeting along with the team's on-ice fortunes. Numbers supplied by a broadcasting source show the Kraken's games drew a 0.96 rating for the season on ROOT Sports — numbers inflated by a strong opening month when the team was still a novelty for local sports fans.
After garnering a dazzling 5.5 rating in the franchise opener against the Vegas Golden Knights and a strong 2.2 average through eight October games, the Kraken broadcasts declined to a 1.4 average rating in November and 1.3 in December. By January, the ratings had dropped to a 0.7 average and then bottomed out at 0.6 in February and March, respectively.
Sports Business Journal reported in May that the Pittsburgh Penguins drew the NHL's highest local TV ratings among U.S.-based squads at 5.43, followed by the St. Louis Blues at 4.28, the Buffalo Sabres at 3.78 and the Minnesota Wild and Vegas each at 3.04. The Kraken did finish ahead of 10 other teams, including the playoff-bound New York Rangers (0.87) and Los Angeles Kings (0.4), both of which play in much larger, crowded sports markets with a higher overall pool of potential viewers from which their ratings percentage was derived.
The playoff-bound Florida Panthers had a 0.46 rating, while the New Jersey Devils (0.20), Arizona Coyotes (0.16) and Anaheim Ducks (0.15) rounded out the bottom three. The report did not include figures for Canadian-based teams, nor the Carolina Hurricanes or Nashville Predators.
Olczyk for years also did NBC Sports national broadcasts of NHL games, many alongside Forslund and continued to do so for TNT in its new deal with the league starting this past season. Under terms of his Kraken deal, the Sun Times story said, he will continue to do some TNT games nationally.
After being drafted third overall by the Blackhawks in 1984, Chicago-born centerman Olczyk went on to play 1,031 regular season games over 16 seasons with six different teams, scoring 342 goals and adding 452 assists. He also played for Team USA at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and coached the Pittsburgh Penguins for parts of two seasons beginning in 2003-04, compiling a record of 31-64-8-10.
Olczyk also engaged in a very public battle with Stage 3 colon cancer starting in summer 2017. By March 2018, he declared himself "cancer free" and wrote about his ordeal in a book titled "Beating the Odds: In hockey and in life" co-authored with Toronto sportswriter Perry Lefko.
