ESPN is leaning in to coverage of the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off like it’s Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.

Heading into Thursday night’s championship game between the USA and Canada, top ESPN hockey talents like P.K. Subban are appearing nonstop across studio programming. They’re making waves, too.

On Tuesday’s Get Up, Subban raised eyebrows by passionately contrasting the pride of NHL players during the 4 Nations tournament with the apathy of NBA stars during their All-Star weekend.

“You’ve got to be on the court. You’ve got to be there. When you’re there, you’ve got to go all in,” Subban said. “The fans got to feel that they’re getting their money’s worth. Right now there’s a big difference between what the NHL’s doing with those events and what the NBA’s doing. 4 Nations works because the players are all in.”

Instead of running away from the three fistfights in the first nine seconds of Saturday’s USA vs. Canada, Subban said it’s exactly what hockey fans wanted to see. “What do fans resonate with? They resonate with what’s real. You got to fight sometimes for your country,” he said. “You got to go out there and leave it on the ice because those people are paying the price of admission.”

I think Subban has a point. The hockey world is thrilled with its shiny new international tournament, while NBA players and critics are holding a circular firing squad around All-Star weekend. 

On Tuesday, ESPN filmed an interview with the Tkachuk family over pizza. The brothers, Matthew and Brady, memorably kicked off Team USA’s 3–1 win over Canada on Saturday with a pair of scraps. Their dad, Keith Tkachuk, one of the greatest power forwards in NHL history, will appear on ESPN’s Thursday night coverage. The network’s flagship SportsCenter will be on location at TD Garden in Boston. To offer maximum access, the Walt Disney Co. will unlock Thursday night’s game for Disney+ streaming customers, along with ESPN+ subscribers. 

As Linda Schulz, vice president of production for ESPN’s National Hockey League coverage, told Front Office Sports: “The excitement that’s continued to grow around 4 Nations Face-Off is evident, beginning with the players themselves, and expanding well beyond the die-hard hockey fan and traditional hockey media. Interest from our own shows at ESPN has been particularly hot, with our NHL commentators doing 4 Nations hits for what feels like every studio show until the puck drops.”

Still to be determined is whether President Donald Trump will attend Thursday’s championship game. Trump attended both Super Bowl LIX and the Daytona 500. During an interview with Fox News on Monday, U.S. men’s national team GM Bill Guerin said he’d “love it” if Trump attended.

Fans appear interested in one-on-one basketball.

The upstart women’s basketball league Unrivaled drew 377,000 viewers on Friday night across TNT and truTV for the semifinals and finals of its inaugural one-on-one tournament. This was the highest audience Unrivaled has drawn yet, surpassing the 312,000 viewers who watched the league’s debut telecast. 

The one-on-one tournament came with a $200,000 prize for the winner, league cofounder Napheesa Collier. 

According to Sports Media Watch, Unrivaled is averaging 190,000 viewers per window (and 227,000 if you take out the games that are exclusive to truTV). The recent one-on-one ratings come with the caveat that Nielsen boosted the formula for out-of-home viewership earlier this month, making apples-to-apples comparisons of past events more challenging. 

In 2023, the year before Caitlin Clark entered the WNBA, that league averaged 505,000 viewers on national regular-season games that aired on ABC, ESPN, and CBS. 

Front Office Sports reported earlier this week that there were discussions during NBA All-Star Weekend in the Bay Area centered on holding a one-on-one tournament during next year’s All-Star break in Los Angeles—with a prize of $1 million. 

Longtime NBA personality Rachel Nichols polled several players—including Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kyrie Irving, James Harden, and Anthony Edwards—who all indicated they’d be interested in competing in the event. 

Roku is expanding further into live sports. 

The streaming platform is adding a number of Bassmaster events to its programming lineup, reps for both sides confirmed to Front Office Sports. 

Bassmaster’s linear TV rights are still held by Fox. Roku will stream different days of the same tournaments, as well as tournaments that are different from what Fox airs. Events that Roku will air include:

The events will be free on Roku for anyone who has the necessary device.

The tournaments have a cult audience; the winner of the Bassmaster Classic receives $300,000.

“It’s an honor to call Roku the streaming home of Bassmaster, an iconic brand with a decades-spanning history of producing best-in-class professional fishing tournaments,” Joe Franzetta, Roku Media’s head of sports, said in a statement. “We look forward to bringing these events for free to the passionate fanbase of this top outdoor sport, as well as introducing Bassmaster to new audiences, expanding the tournaments’ reach to millions of streaming households in the U.S.”

B.A.S.S. COO Phillip Johnson said the fishing league is “very excited about the creation of a new outlet for posted video content, on a dedicated Bassmaster FAST channel on Roku.”

Roku’s other live sports rights include an exclusive Sunday morning MLB game, the X Games, the NBA G League, and Formula E. It also airs The Rich Eisen Show and GMFB: Overtime.