Jay Bilas recently used an analogy about college basketball coaches who clutch their pearls when media members analyze their sport. Bilas isn’t a chef, he said, but he can still critique the meal. By that logic, Joe Buck doesn’t need to have called Olympic hockey before to recognize what a gold-medal broadcast should feel like.
Buck is one of the defining voices of his generation, the soundtrack to countless October swings and February confetti showers. He’s called every big moment you see in TikTok compilations and Instagram reels. He understands what the presentation should look like for moments that matter, what the broadcast needs to deliver, and how the pieces fit together to create something people remember. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t called hockey before. He knows the game. He knows great broadcasting. And he knows NBC nailed it.
“The presentation was as good as the game, which says a lot because the game is something that I think we’ll all remember,” Buck said about NBC’s coverage of the USA-Canada men’s hockey gold medal game. “There’s a whole new generation of fans who are going to think of that overtime game, and that’s going to be either for a fan or for a young player or for an announcer. It’s going to be kind of a jumping off point to think, ‘That’s what I want to do.'”
Buck singled out Mike Tirico and Kenny Albert for particular praise. He might want to be Mike Tirico when he grows up. Well, not actually — Buck’s 56 and has his own Hall of Fame career — but you get the point. He was effusive in his praise for the NBC broadcaster who delivered an unforgettable monologue in the aftermath of the USA’s first hockey gold medal since the Miracle on Ice.
“Tirico [is] amazing,” Buck said during an appearance at SBJ’s National Sports Forum in St. Louis. “To do so many different events, as we all know [he] did the Super Bowl and then flew over and was hosting the Olympics. I’ve talked to Mike [and] I’m like, ‘It’s OK to say no, just once in a while.’ But he’s incredible.”
Tirico pulled off one of the most remarkable feats in broadcasting history by calling Super Bowl LX in San Francisco on Sunday, Feb 9, then flying to Italy overnight to host NBC’s primetime Olympics coverage the next day. And Tirico handled it without missing a step, looking and sounding like he’d been in Milan the entire time.
The 2026 Winter Olympics capped with Tirico delivering what many called a masterclass to close NBC’s broadcast of the USA-Canada men’s hockey gold medal game Sunday. After the USA won its first gold medal in men’s hockey since the “Miracle on Ice” in 1980, with a thrilling 2-1 overtime victory, Tirico wrapped the broadcast with a nearly five-minute live essay that drew comparisons to Vin Scully’s call of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game. The monologue contextualizing the Hughes brothers’ journey and the moment’s significance for a new generation of hockey fans earned praise across the industry.
Albert handled play-by-play for that gold medal game alongside Eddie Olczyk and Brian Boucher, delivering the call on Jack Hughes’ overtime winner, which will be replayed for years to come.
Albert’s performance throughout the Olympics reinforced why NBC made him the lead hockey voice for his seventh Winter Games. He called all of Team USA’s men’s and women’s games, along with the medal round, working alongside Olczyk for the men’s tournament and AJ Mleczko for the women’s. The 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympics delivered what many considered the most compelling Winter Games ever, with NBC’s presentation — from Albert’s play-by-play to Tirico’s hosting to the network’s Gold Zone coverage on Peacock — matching the historic moments on the ice and snow.
The Olympics concluded Sunday with the men’s hockey gold medal game serving as the exclamation point on two weeks that saw Team USA dominate across multiple sports. It also served as validation that NBC’s Olympic broadcast team — Tirico and Albert especially — delivered something worthy of the moment, and Buck made sure to give them their flowers, as he often does for broadcasts and broadcasters that get big right.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.