Looking at next year’s schedule. It looks like they have pretty much cleared Wednesdays for TNT (and Sportsnet) in Canada.
Also the Winter Classic scheduled for 2pm on Jan. 2.
And the black Friday Thanksgiving showdown is listed in the release as Pittsburgh-Philadelphia, Tampa St. Louis double header. But the game times was 5 and 7pm. I wonder if the league is losing ABC coverage for that.
That's what we expected for Wednesday's for this season. The only disappointing part is that it looks like they didn't learn from this past season about scheduling games 3 hours apart instead of 2 and a half. Where the 2nd game of the DH essentially always started on TruTV.
Lot of 7pm and 9:30pm & 7:30pm and 10pm likely TNT DH windows. Instead of 7pm and 10pm or 7:30pm and 10:30pm. Which makes much more sense and given the popularity of the studio would even make room for a 15 minute'ish bridge show between games.
Can also pretty much put together the Saturday ABC schedule. The usual suspects with Rangers, Bruins, Pens, Caps, etc.. Does look like majority of Saturday's will be the same 3pm ET slot though some of those Saturday's are looking like they could be 1pm ET games, which is another Saturday slot ABC uses for sports that time of year.
Black Friday was interesting to me, as well. Would be interesting if that was part of a yearly rotation since Disney is supposed to have the "A" package (which as we know is sort of a misnomer anyway but still..) but TNT would have Black Friday & all outdoor games which would be all the marquee regular season events -not to mention the Cup Final- outside of "Opening night" which TNT gets the Avs opener (arena booking issue) there, too.
I do wonder if they're just trying to make the entire day an event and that they've only just announced the TNT DH part of it? Since Canes@Bruins is there in the traditional 1pm ET slot. More of a 3-game day, sort of the NHL version of what the NFL does the day before? Otherwise would be weird to me Disney would give away their highest rated regular season game and their only marquee regular season date, other than opening night which they don't even have the champs for. So for now, I'll lean towards Bruins being on nationally TV (ABC) on Black Friday.
Of course could just be giving up Black Friday as a one-off year, to not compete with the World Cup?