Great Scott!
Kate Scott is one of America's best play-by-play broadcasters, and once upon a time I tried to hire her and others nobody knew much about to do Blackhawks games. It's a good story about our business.
I got a good eye and great ear for sportscasters and our business.
The other night I turn on the WNBA game to watch Indiana and Caitlin Clark. I have more than a passing curiosity with the league now. They’re moving. They have momentum. They have a real national TV deal (an 11-year, $ 3.1 billion dollar media rights deal on multiple big-name carriers), plenty of stars, and their ratings show them gaining fast on other sports and leagues, including the NHL.
And when the open hits for the game Wednesday night, and they go exterior shot, to wide interior of the building shot, I hear a very familiar bright and confident voice and I smile. It’s Kate. Kate Scott. My old buddy for a brief time.
Now I not only get Caitlin and Sophie and the rest, one of my favorite callers is on the game. She’s so good. So sharp. Shrewd and clever. I know I’m in for a great couple of hours. I was.
Just the week before, the WNBA’s Indiana Fever and New York Liberty game (July 18, 2026) averaged 2.6 million viewers.
Want some context?
The NHL’s highest rated (most viewed) 2026 regular season game was the February 1st Stadium Series contest between Boston and Tampa Bay. The ESPN telecast averaged 2.1 million viewers and peaked at 2.4 million.
On Wednesday it was Indiana/Connecticut. The Fever hung 123 on em, beating the Sun by 35, and I hear another master class from the booth.
I’ve talked here about going to work for the Chicago Blackhawks in the 2021-22 season to help them replace Pat Foley, their longtime, retiring TV play-by-play broadcaster and add some other broadcast talent around their shows.
It turned into a complete corporate clusterfuck, but the great part for me was meeting and working with so many incredibly gifted young broadcasters.
When we started all this in Chicago with a bold agenda to retool and potentially remake local team sports broadcasts, I was very juiced up. For weeks before I got to the Windy City, I scoured the world really, looking for the next evolutionary wave of broadcast talent to handle the industry’s changing demands.
There were a handful of voices that rose above the rest. And none of them had done much hockey - which was sort of the point. I didn’t care what they had done, I cared about where they could go and what they could give us beyond parroting the same tired phrases and cadences of NHL hockey to date. There is so much more that can be done aside from the usual model of two old dudes doing every game until they die.
Those new voices I found for the Hawks included Baltimore Orioles play-by-play man Kevin Brown, Drew Carter, now the play-by-play voice of the Boston Celtics among lots of other things, Mike Monaco - yeah - that Mike Monaco, and Kate Scott.
I knew - KNEW - these were all broadcast savants, even though their profiles weren’t quite established in 2021.
And Kate… damn. What a piece of work in all the greatest ways. Let me tell you about Kate… who had called one hockey game and it was clear didn’t have much hockey experience - but that game showed me she was a master technician and clever as hell. I very much wanted to work with her…
