While Chris Cuthbert has been calling hockey and other sports for more than four decades across CBC, TSN, and Sportsnet, he’s most associated in many minds with his call of Sidney Crosby’s gold-medal winning goal in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.
Well, 15 years to the month after that, Cuthbert called another big Canadian goal in a 3-2 overtime win against the U.S., this time in the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game.
Here are those 2010 and 2025 calls for comparison (Cuthbert’s 2010 call is the first one in the YouTube clip below):
That 2010 call has Cuthbert say “Iginla! Crosby SCORES! Sidney Crosby! The golden goal! And Canada has once-in-a-lifetime Olympic gold!”
The 2025 one has him say “Makar sends it around, Marner waiting, Connor McDavid! SCORES! Connor McDavid for Canada!” He then drops out to let the crowd noise tell the story.
A lot has changed over those 15 years.
This was a new international tournament (albeit one descended from the World Cup of Hockey), not the Olympics. And Cuthbert now works for Sportsnet and parent company Rogers rather than rival TSN/CTV/Bell, making that jump in 2020 after Rogers won Canadian national NHL rights. And Ray Ferraro, who was Cuthbert’s analyst on that 2010 Canadian Olympic gold-medal game broadcast (Pierre McGuire was normally the top TSN/CTV NHL analyst then, but was calling that one for NBC), was on the U.S. call of this one for ESPN, where he and play-by-play voice Sean McDonough had reminisced about Crosby’s 2010 goal earlier in this game (which Crosby, now 37, was playing in):
But it’s quite something that Cuthbert was on the Canadian TV call for two memorable 3-2 overtime international hockey wins over the U.S. for Canada, 15 years apart. And that’s maybe more remarkable still in that there hasn’t been best-on-best top-level international hockey in almost a decade, with the 2016 World Cup of Hockey really the last thing there thanks to the NHL not going to the 2018 or 2022 Winter Olympics. (They will be back for 2026 and 2030, as NBC noted Thursday night.)
There are the IIHF World Championships every year, but their timing during the Stanley Cup Playoffs means that the rosters there are often limited, and that often limits the fan interest as well.
But there does seem to remain a strong appetite for best-on-best international hockey.
This 4 Nations Face-Off drew a huge amount of attention in its debut, with Matthew Tkachuk (who just won the Stanley Cup last summer) and ESPN analyst P.K. Subban both describing this championship game as “bigger” than the Stanley Cup. (And that’s without really considering the political dimensions adding fuel to this particular matchup.) And that led to another great Cuthbert call of a remarkable Canadian hockey moment.