Mike Emrick is the Vin Scully of hockey, a play-by-play broadcaster whose pleasant mastery of so much about the job — cadence, anecdote, and defter deployment of verb than Roget, for starters — has made him virtually universally beloved in a disagreeable age when spiteful arrows are aimed at even the best of us.
The 72-year-old Emrick, known as Doc — he earned is PhD in communications from Bowling Green University in 1976 — has been the lead play-by-play voice for the NHL on NBC since it was in its previous incarnation on Versus in 2005-06. He has the hardware as confirmation of his success and appeal, but his jovial nature never suggests he needs it.