La Soiree du Hockey

La Soirée du hockey (literally translated to The Night of Hockey) was a popular ice hockey show in Canada. It was the French language Radio-Canada equivalent of the English Canadian CBC show Hockey Night in Canada. The show used "The Hockey Theme" as its theme song.

La Soirée du hockey most frequently featured Montreal Canadiens games on Saturday evenings, usually in parallel with English-language broadcasts on CBC. In later years CBC would drop some of its split-national telecasts in the 7:00pm ET window, resulting in a single national telecast at that time (almost always featuring the Toronto Maple Leafs), while Radio-Canada would continue to feature the Canadiens. The broadcast would feature Quebec Nordiques and Ottawa Senators games occasionally during the regular season on rare occasions where the Canadiens were idle on Saturday night.

During the playoffs, SDH would feature all games involving the Montreal Canadiens. After they were eliminated, the program would usually feature series of interest to French Canadians, up to and including the Stanley Cup Finals.

Beginning with the 2002–03 season, RDS secured exclusive French language rights to the NHL. The deal, reached with the Canadiens and not directly with the league, was meant to ensure a consistent home for all Canadiens games, whereas, as a general-interest network, Radio-Canada could not give up so much airtime to Canadiens games. The announcement drew the ire of, among others, then-Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, who suggested that the network would somehow be violating its conditions of licence by not airing La Soirée du hockey. In fact, there is no specific mention in the CBC's licence from the CRTC (or any other legal document governing the CBC) that the CBC's networks carry coverage of NHL games, nor that there be parity between the two networks' carriage of such games.

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