Doc Emrick recalls Barry Melrose as ‘least predictable’ broadcast partner

Barry Melrose warned Doc Emrick before they ever called a game together.

“You’ve never worked with anyone like me,” Melrose told him, “and you’re probably never going to again.”

Emrick, who spent nearly 50 years in broadcasting working alongside some of the most meticulous analysts in hockey history, found out Melrose was telling the truth.

Emrick joined Brandon Contes on the latest episode of the Awful Announcing Podcast and named Melrose the least predictable broadcast partner of his career. The two worked together on ABC’s NHL coverage in the late 1990s, when Melrose was already one of the most recognizable figures in the sport after coaching the Kings to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final against Montreal. Where Emrick’s other broadcast partners arrived at the arena with yellow legal paper folded into strips and feverishly scribbled notes from hallway conversations with players and coaches, Melrose would scan the press room notes, come upstairs, and let whatever happened happen.

“A play would take place, and he would either be chuckling about it, or he would come up with some old bit of hockey lore or a hockey expression he picked up during his days in the NHL or coaching,” Emrick said. “And, of course, he could share a lot about what it was like to coach, especially in playoff situations, because he had that in ’93 with the Kings.”

The career that produced those stories was rarely predictable either.

Melrose had been one of ESPN’s most prominent hockey voices since 1996, becoming so synonymous with the network’s NHL coverage that when ESPN lost its hockey rights in 2005 and scaled back dramatically, Melrose was essentially the last man standing, making regular appearances with Scott Van Pelt on the midnight SportsCenter long after the network had gutted the rest of its hockey staff. Then, in 2008, 13 years removed from his last NHL bench job, he left ESPN to coach the Tampa Bay Lightning — a decision that lasted all of 16 games before the organization fired him, telling Awful Announcing years later that the whole thing was broken before it started.

He returned to ESPN, spent several years at NHL Network, and eventually settled back into Bristol, where the mullet and the personality and the analysis remained as recognizable as anything the network put on TV. That run ended in October 2023 when he stepped away after a Parkinson’s diagnosis.

Melrose has been largely out of the public eye since then. But Emrick’s description of him is as fitting a tribute as any.

“He was the least predictable because he was probably the most colorful — maybe not the most — he was colorful enough,” said Emerick. “You just weren’t sure what was going to happen.”

The episode also covered Emrick’s one broadcasting regret — his call of Patrick Kane’s Stanley Cup-clinching overtime goal in Philadelphia in 2010, which he described as “substandard” — and the career that brought him 22 Stanley Cup Finals, six Winter Olympics, and eight Sports Emmy Awards before his retirement in October 2020 after nearly 50 years in the business.