You apparently missed the 2002-03 and 2003-04 seasons where ESPN was an afterthought. That's not saying NBCSN has done for the NHL what I think it should (though I wonder how much of that is limited by the NHL's desire to retain programming for the NHL Network), but ESPN wasn't giving an hour pregame show or a half-hour postgame show to the NHL for regular season games.
Oh sure, you did get NHL2Night most nights with ESPN to loosely recap the night's events, but that was also when the NHL Network wasn't around. And, late in the ESPN contract, you didn't even get that at all. And, that show wasn't on the main network - it was on ESPN2, before the Mother Ship had spent $11873 billion on MNF, college basketball, college football, NBA and F1 rights, along with anything else it could get its hands on to limit the amount of coverage other competitors had available.