Sean McDonough has delivered some of the best calls of this Stanley Cup Final, was named the 2025 National Sportscaster of the Year, and had Joe Buck calling him one of the two best play-by-play voices in any sport just a year ago. He’ll be the first to tell you it wasn’t always this comfortable.

Appearing on the Sports Media Watch Podcast, McDonough opened up about just how difficult the adjustment was when ESPN reacquired the NHL rights in 2021 after a 16-year absence from the sport, and about experiencing something rare for a broadcaster of his caliber.

“I’m completely comfortable now. It was an adjustment when we first got it five years ago,” he said. “I obviously followed it very closely as a fan in the 16-17 years that ESPN didn’t have the NHL, but I hadn’t broadcast a game. I had done some Frozen Fours in between, but I had no full realization of just how much the game had changed, especially in terms of the speed. Twenty years ago, you could look down at your notes, make sure you had the right name and number, find a little nugget in your notes, look up, and the puck was still making its way up the ice. Now, if you look down for a split second and you look up, it’s hard to find the puck.”

McDonough has spent decades as one of the most versatile play-by-play voices in the business before ESPN tapped him as its lead NHL voice when the network reacquired the rights in 2021. His NHL résumé was thin by comparison. The last time he’d called a full NHL season was during ESPN’s previous run with the sport from 2000-203, and some questioned the hire given that Kenny Albert, who took the top job at TNT Sports that same year, had years of NHL experience on him. McDonough has long since answered those questions. But he’s the first to tell you the early skepticism wasn’t entirely off base.

What made the adjustment to being the network’s lead NHL voice particularly hard, McDonough explained, was that the quality ESPN specifically hired him for — his storytelling — suddenly worked against him in hockey’s environment.

“One of the reasons they hired me is they think I’m a good storyteller and they want to humanize the players more, so what I realized very quickly is it’s very hard to tell stories within action in hockey because the puck moves too fast,” he said. “…You have to be very judicious in when you tell stories and how you tell them. And, basically, I try to tell them now as just one-line nuggets… I kind of learned that the hard way. You have to really memorize the names and numbers, and you can’t look down when the puck’s in action.”

For the first time in a career spent calling some of the biggest events in sports, McDonough felt out of his depth.

“I was not good, to be quite candid about it, when we first started back five years ago,” he continued. “And it was the first time that I really felt — I never really felt inadequate — and I kind of did when we first got the hockey, to the point where I thought, ‘I used to think this was my best sport and so did a lot of other people who know me, now I’m not sure about this.’”

He said the adjustment came once he figured out how to work within the sport’s constraints rather than fight them. The bigger ongoing challenge is simply not calling enough games, being that he also serves as the network’s No. 2 college football voice. ESPN’s regular-season NHL package is limited, which means McDonough goes stretches without being in a booth, and hockey play-by-play is uniquely dependent on rhythm and repetition in a way that other sports aren’t.

“It’s still a little difficult, to be honest, because we don’t do that many regular-season games,” McDonough admitted, “so I find it’s really just now in the playoffs where we have a game every other night for the most part that you really do get in a rhythm, because hockey play-by-play is largely about rhythm and flow.”

He was quick to add that he may have been harder on himself than warranted. But the standard McDonough holds himself to has never been a question. He pushed through illness during the 2024 Stanley Cup Final, consulting team doctors in Edmonton rather than stepping away, and his call on Seth Jarvis’s overtime winner earlier this week was as good as anything he’s produced in any sport. The broadcaster who thought he might not be cut out for hockey has become the standard by which ESPN’s hockey coverage is judged.

Sean McDonough: “These gentlemen would quiet all the critics wondering where they’ve been if they score the game-winner in overtime… THEY SCOOOOORE! SETH JARVIS QUIETS THE CRITICS AND IGNITES THE CROWD!” 🏒🚨🎙️ #StanleyCupFinal #NHL pic.twitter.com/Yi8lzmq6iW

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 5, 2026

“Most of the time, I feel very comfortable in the booth calling a game, and kind of feel like that’s where I’m supposed to be. But there were a few hockey games in the early days where I thought, ‘Oh boy, I better get better at this in a hurry.’”

He did.