Pierre McGuire refutes reports of his firing at NBC

Straight from Pierre's mouth!

HockeyFeed
HockeyFeed
Published 4 years ago
Pierre McGuire refutes reports of his firing at NBC
Zuma Press

In case you missed the news last week, Rick Carpiniello of The Athletic reported that broadcaster Pierre McGuire had been removed from his position with NBC Sports.

Check it out:



So… he was fired? Not exactly. According to Carpiniello, McGuire hasn’t lost his job entirely it’s just that he’s been moved to the “No. 2” team at NBC Sports and former NHLer Brian Boucher will take McGuire’s spot on the “No. 1” team.

Again, check it out:



But… not so fast says McGuire himself. On TSN 690 radio on Montreal this morning, McGuire refuted Carpiniello’s reports and maintained that nothing has changed with respect to his position with NBC.

Check out these quotes from McGuire courtesy of the Montreal Gazette:

“Somebody, I don’t know who in New York, wrote something that was very inaccurate,” McGuire told Melnick. “In fact, we all at NBC got our work schedules yesterday and today I got an elongated work schedule from NBC and also spoke with major-domo Sam Flood, who’s really been responsible for creating the NHL on NBC. He was just like: ‘I don’t know how all this started, I don’t know where it came from. I’m apologizing. This is what the schedule is. We went through this last year, you went to the West to help with the ratings,’ and we had gigantic numbers both in the East and the West last year and I enjoyed doing it. I really liked it because when you were doing my job for almost 16 years of staying in the East all the time — or virtually all the time — you saw the other teams on TV, but you didn’t spend time with those players very often unless they were on the East Coast swing. You never really got past Minnesota, so now I get a chance to see every player in the league and talk to them and it’s been great and I really appreciated it.
“I don’t know where it all starts, I know there’s some really mean-spirited people out there,” McGuire added. “But I can assure you that I have two years left on my contract — just like NBC does — and unless something happens to me I’m not going anywhere.”

McGuire is a divisive broadcaster amongst hockey fans. You either love him or you hate him. And you know what… that’s just fine with Pierre, but he just can’t figure out why people have a problem with him.

Again, check out these quotes from McGuire courtesy of the Montreal Gazette:

“I don’t know … I couldn’t tell you,” McGuire said. “They don’t know me, obviously, those people don’t know me. But I couldn’t tell you, I don’t know … I don’t know. … I’m not going to try to get into other people’s minds, but I think it’s important that if you’re going to do this job that you have strong opinions. If you can’t back them up, then you’re probably not going to last very long in the business. And I think it’s really important to have opinions that are informed, meaning that you’ve done a lot of handiwork and a lot of studying, whether it’s on tape or whether it’s with information or whether it’s through communication with different people so that you’re just not throwing stuff out there against the wall to see if it would stick." 

Pierre has opinions… that’s for sure…