When he’s not roughly 30,000 feet off the ground, NHL on TNT play-by-play announcer Kenny Albert spends so much of his time in the undifferentiated terrain of chain hotels that he’s taken to using his phone as a mnemonic device.
“Sometimes, when it was my third or fourth hotel in a week, I’d catch myself heading off to the room number I’d been assigned at the previous stop,” Albert said in an interview. “Now I make sure to take a photo of the number plate, so I don’t have that problem anymore.”
Such are the attendant challenges of the fall calendar, when the only sportscaster whose schedule makes Mike Tirico look like an agoraphobe yo-yos his way across the map and on to the next NHL, NFL or MLB game. Three weeks ago, Albert flew to London for NFL Network’s coverage of the Vikings-Browns game, a transatlantic jaunt that was only the first leg of a 13,565-mile journey that took him from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium to Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena to Highmark Stadium in Orchard Park and then back again to Sin City. (Port of call for his second visit to the desert in five days: Allegiant Stadium.)
Albert seemed to spend more time in the air that week than on the ground, as he whipsawed from assignment to assignment. This week finds him practically in homebody mode, as his itinerary takes him from New York to New Orleans to Vancouver to New York to Los Angeles, which works out to another 8,276 miles up there in the wild blue yonder. Forget frequent flier mileage, Albert’s putting up NASA-grade numbers.
“I don’t have any back-to-backs this week so it actually feels kind of relaxing, believe it or not,” Albert said, and I sort of don’t believe it. But a life spent in high-altitude liminal spaces is the price he’s willing to pay for what he clearly believes is the best job in the world. “It’s the craziest time of the year for me, with football and hockey overlapping, the Rangers and the TNT games, plus football every weekend,” Albert said. “But I get so much work done on planes, all the prep and research and charts, that I don’t even mind the long flights.”
If the sheer distance Albert travels is inconceivable to those of us with more earthbound callings, his on-air stats are equally mind-boggling. In June, he passed his father, the legendary Marv Albert, to claim the No. 2 spot on the all-time list of most prolific national sportscasters. While he zoomed by the Voice of Basketball during Game 1 of TNT’s presentation of the Stanley Cup Final, Kenny acknowledged that his dad has him beat on the local front. (For that matter, no one can ever eclipse Marv’s track record on Letterman.)
According to the bean counters at Un/Necessary Sports Research, the younger Albert now has 1,508 national booth appearances under his belt, putting him within arm’s reach of Dick Stockton, who leads all comers with 1,544 games called. By way of comparison, Joe Buck is cruising along at 1,142 national dates and Al Michaels is at 1,071.
After 35 years of enjoying a front-row seat to some of sports’ most memorable moments, Albert says the April 6 Capitals-Islanders game is among his top three calls. That night Alex Ovechkin potted his 895th career goal, passing Wayne Gretzky as the top scorer in NHL history. While the Russian threatened to make history against Chicago just two nights earlier—he’d reached the 894 mark before the Blackhawks yanked their goalie—Ovechkin apparently wasn’t interested in breaking the record by way of an empty net. Still, the game clock couldn’t tick down to triple zeroes fast enough for Albert, who was sweating out the final period from his hotel room in Atlanta, where he was getting ready for the next night’s Knicks-Hawks game on MSG.
“From conversations I’d had with [Capitals coach] Spencer Carbery, I was pretty confident that Ovi was going to want someone in the net when he broke the record,” Albert said. “But he had three unbelievable chances in the final minute and I was going crazy in that hotel room because we all wanted to be a part of history. And sure enough…”
Albert’s call was memorable for its simplicity. After heralding the moment (“Here is Ovechkin! Shoots! He scores! He scores! No. 895!”), he got out of the way, letting the pictures and the crowd noise tell the rest of the story.
“Those of us who get paid to talk for a living sometimes get the highest praise for saying nothing, which is kind of funny to think about,” he said.
As Albert and the NHL on TNT crew keep things nailed down from above the ice, Jon Diament takes care of business on the revenue front. With the 2025-26 season only weeks old, Warner Bros. Discovery’s head of sports sales is “basically sold out of NHL inventory,” thanks to an unprecedented show of demand during the spring upfront bazaar. “We sold double the amount that we normally sell in all our sports,” Diament said. “Live sports really drove the upfront this year, and that put us in mostly sold-out positions across our portfolio.”
TNT bulked up its schedule with 10 more regular-season games, bringing its total number of NHL telecasts to 72. Even with the additional inventory—the new real estate includes five Sunday afternoon windows in March and April—the demand made for a quick sell-through. “There are very few scatter opportunities left, and right now we’re finalizing our Winter Classic plans,” Diament said. The Jan. 2 Rangers-Panthers game will be staged in balmy Miami, a geographical wrinkle that should keep the tenders of the ice on their toes.
Among the other big dates on TNT’s NHL calendar is a Blackhawks-Rangers centennial face-off on Dec. 10, with the Original Six franchises duking it out in a celebration of 100 years of gutbucket hockey, and a Dec. 23 holiday tripleheader. Among the network’s key partners include official NHL sponsor Verizon, which sponsors TNT’s pregame show, and first-time backer Vanda Pharmaceuticals, title sponsor of the first intermission report and the postgame telecast.
Pharma is TNT’s third-biggest NHL ad category, behind financial services and quick-service restaurants.
For Albert’s part, he’s got seven Ovechkin games scheduled this season, and dozens of upcoming dates with some of the league’s youngest superstars. Following an Oct. 15 shellacking of the Blues in St. Louis, Connor Bedard and the Chicago Blackhawks are locked in for five more TNT games, including a Nov. 12 meeting with the red-hot Devils. Rookie Arseny Gritsyuk has put up six points in his first 10 games with New Jersey.
And as was the case after February’s wildly successful Four Nations Face-Off, interest in the NHL is expected to reach even greater heights in the aftermath of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics—set to allow the league’s players to participate for the first time since the 2014 Games. This will mark Albert’s seventh stint as the anchor of NBC’s Olympics hockey coverage, a run that began in 2002 when Doc Emrick’s dog forced the veteran announcer to pull a Wally Pipp. “It’s amazing how things work out sometimes, but a week before the Salt Lake Olympics, Doc had to pull out due to an issue with his dog,” Albert said. “I got called out of the bullpen because he didn’t want to leave his wife home alone with a sick dog for two-and-a-half weeks.”
All of which means there’s plenty of hockey for Albert to look forward to when he’s not zooming through the lower stratosphere—although his body of work occasionally has him peering in the opposite direction.
“When I look back at the number of events and some of the names that are on that list of sportscasters, it’s kind of surreal,” he said. “It feels like it was just yesterday when I was starting out doing minor league hockey with the Baltimore Skipjacks back in 1990. Where has all the time gone? But I guess it’s sort of like athletes and coaches always say: You take it day by day, one game at a time. And here we are, 35 years later.”
