Joe Beninati and Craig Laughlin are forever the NHL’s top-ranked commentary duo in the eyes of Washington Capitals fans, but the two long-time broadcast partners also recently received some national recognition.
Awful Announcing, a site that tracks the ins and outs of the sports media landscape, polled its readers to evaluate each of the 32 NHL teams’ local TV broadcasts. The poll asked all respondents to grade each booth on a scale of A to F and provide comments on individual teams, if desired.
The letter grade results were then converted into numerical grades, with A corresponding to 4 and F corresponding to 0. Beninati and Laughlin, Monumental Sports Network’s team, ranked fourth best out of the 32 duos in the NHL, with an average response rating of 3.09.
The average grade across the 32 booths was 2.61, corresponding to a C letter grade. Joe B and Locker collected the second-highest raw A votes (176 out of 350) and the third-highest percentage of A votes.
“One of the best pairings to ever do it,” one respondent said.
“They’ve been together forever, their banter never ceases to amuse, and they’re always on top of the game,” another answered.
The dynamic duo is quickly approaching 30 years together in the booth, first joining up full-time in 1996 after Kenny Albert left Home Team Sports to become the radio play-by-play voice of the New York Rangers. Since then, they’ve been the voices behind the Capitals’ Stanley Cup-winning season (2018), the franchise’s first Stanley Cup Final appearance in 1998, and nearly all of Alex Ovechkin’s record-breaking 897 career goals.
Awful Announcing does note that Alan May briefly took over as the Capitals’ lead color analyst after Laughlin underwent open-heart surgery in early February.
The only broadcast teams to finish ahead of Joe B and Locker were Detroit’s Ken Daniels and Mickey Redmond (3.11), Seattle’s John Forslund and JT Brown (3.22), and the Rangers’ Sam Rosen and Joe Micheletti (3.41). Rosen and Micheletti both announced their retirements after this past season.
Finishing last in the rankings was the Boston tandem of Judd Sirott and Andy Brickley (1.97). Sirott has been at the helm of play-by-play for the Bruins for just one year after the highly controversial Jack Edwards retired at the end of the 2023-24 campaign.
