Today celebrates the 85th anniversary of a groundbreaking moment in sports and television history: on February 25, 1940, the New York Rangers faced off against the Montreal Canadiens in the first hockey game ever televised in the United States. Broadcast live from Madison Square Garden on experimental station W2XBS—later WNBC—the game aired to a tiny audience of New Yorkers with early TV sets, captured by a single camera fixed above the rink. Eight-and-a-half decades later, this primitive telecast remains a milestone that fused America’s growing love for hockey with the dawn of a new medium.
The matchup, a regular-season clash between two Original Six NHL teams, ended with the Rangers edging out the Canadiens 6-2 before a crowd of 12,000 fans—none aware they were part of broadcast history. W2XBS, owned by RCA and operating under an experimental license from the Federal Radio Commission, used one stationary Iconoscope camera positioned in the arena’s mezzanine, offering a wide, static view of the ice. Bill Allen, a radio announcer for WNYC, provided play-by-play, his voice crackling through roughly 300 TV receivers across the city, as noted in The New York Times archives. The setup was bare-bones—no zooms, no replays—just a flickering 441-line black-and-white image that ran from 8:30 p.m. to around 11 p.m. ET.
Now fans can easily watch a ton of NHL games with ESPN+ subscription.
This wasn’t hockey’s first brush with TV—Canada had aired a game in 1939—but it was America’s debut, driven by RCA’s push to showcase television ahead of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The NHL, then a niche league with seven teams, saw little immediate impact; the game drew no major headlines beyond a brief Times mention calling it “an experiment in sports transmission.” Yet it planted a seed. “Picture a grainy feed, one angle, and fans squinting at 10-inch screens—that’s how TV hockey started here,” hockey historian Stan Fischler told Sports Illustrated in a 2020 retrospective. The Rangers’ win, powered by Bryan Hextall’s two goals, flickered into history as a novelty few grasped at the time.
Social media today is abuzz with nostalgia. “85 years since Rangers-Canadiens went on TV—imagine watching NHL with one camera!” an X user posted. Another added, “1940’s W2XBS broadcast was crude, but it’s why we have ESPN today.” The telecast aired without commercials—RCA footed the bill—and reached only a sliver of New York’s elite with sets costing $600 (over $12,000 in 2025 dollars). By 1946, regular NHL broadcasts emerged, but 1940’s game was the spark.
Eighty-five years on, as hockey thrives on high-def screens nationwide, that grainy Rangers victory stands as a frozen moment when TV and the ice first met—proving even a single lens could capture the sport’s speed and soul for generations to come.
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