Why Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek listen to listeners of their '32 Thoughts' podcast (2024)

A man from Texas called in with a story of how Jack Campbell, the goaltender, facilitated his marriage proposal. Another called in from Salt Lake City with a suggestion to fix the NHL All-Star Game: Why not just have all the players throw their sticks in the middle of the ice, then divide them into teams like they did when they were kids?

As overseer of “32 Thoughts,” the Sportsnet hockey podcast, producer Amil Delic is also curator of an eclectic mix of listener feedback. During the busy periods of the season — the NHL trade deadline, the all-star break and playoffs — he said the show can receive up to 400 emails and 60 voicemails a week.

There are notes from Europe and Australia and the Philippines. Listeners often ask about the salary cap and rules around the game, but they have also discussed their PhD theses and offered ideas on how to make the game more entertaining. (Why not, as one email went, have players use a wooden stick for a game?)

Delic, who works with hosts Elliotte Friedman and Jeff Marek, sifts through the email and voicemail sent to what they call “The Thought Line,” then filters the most interesting toward a recurring segment that has become a staple of the show. As sports talk moves into the digital space, the segment is an evolution of an ancient terrestrial radio practice: The listener call-in.

“It’s the listener’s voice,” said Delic.

A Sportsnet spokesperson said “32 Thoughts” averages 331,000 downloads a week, which translates to about 1.3 million downloads a month. In a crowded landscape — with legacy brands (“OverDrive,” at TSN) and independents (“The Steve Dangle Podcast”) — it routinely ranks among top sports podcasts in Canada, according to data from Chartable.

Delic said the episode featuring the listener feedback, which appears on Monday, usually has both the most engagement and the highest completion rate. (There are two shows a week during the regular season, but production is being bumped up to three through the rest of the NHL playoffs.)

“The only thing that I kind of don’t like about it — that I did like about taking calls — is the element of surprise,” said Marek.

Open phone lines were a signature piece of Marek’s entry into broadcasting, when he co-hosted a late-night show on The Fan 590 with friends George Stroumboulopoulos and Bob Mackowycz. They sat behind the microphones from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. on Saturdays.

“The clubs had just let out,” said Marek. “They’re driving home and, ‘We’re going to call the local radio station and we’ve got something to say, dammit. We’ve probably been over-poured by that damned bartender and we’re going to let someone know our opinions.’

“Those were always interesting ones.”

The voices and messages that appear on “32 Thoughts” have already been vetted, he said, but that does not diminish their value. They can be silly, he said, but they can also be poignant or thought-provoking.

One of his personal favourites was a listener who proposed the NHL adopt what they called “The Cup of Hope,” which would be a tournament for the teams that did not qualify for the playoffs. The winner would receive the No. 1 pick in the draft, along with various financial incentives.

Marek chuckled: “I just like the title ‘The Cup of Hope.’”

Another message was more personal. It was from a family going through a divorce. The mother wrote in to say her young son was hockey-obsessed, and that they listened to the podcast during many of the endless drives to practices and games and tournaments during the season.

“Those are the ones that really hit you,” said Marek. “Because you don’t know who you’re talking to, right?”

The concept that became “32 Thoughts” was hatched more than a decade ago. Friedman was working as a sideline reporter with “Hockey Night in Canada,” and would present a list of nuggets and ideas to the production team before the show went to air.

Inevitably, through the developments within the game that night, not all of the nuggets would make it to air. A producer suggested Friedman begin writing as a means to house tidbits that would otherwise live only in his notebook.

Those ideas congealed into a notebook-type column at the CBC, and also at National Post, which held a content-sharing agreement with the public broadcaster for a brief period around 2010. It has been in its current form for the better part of a decade.

“I can’t respond to all the emails I’ve gotten, telling me what a loser I am,” said Friedman. “But I think, at the end of the day, people just want to know that they’re heard.”

Delic sorts through the criticism that lands in “The Thought Line,” and passes some of it along. There have been times, Friedman said, when he has either returned the email directly or called the listener to chat in person on the phone.

Once, the latter caused some surprise. Friedman called the listener, who then reached out with a direct message on Twitter: “I just talked to someone who I think was you for 20 minutes, can I just check that is really you?”

Delic described another note that did not really fit into any category. It was from a father in Halifax, writing to tell a story about his hockey-loving 14-year-old daughter. She wanted to see the gold-medal game at the world junior championship earlier this year, but her parents were not going to spend the $1,000 needed to get inside the building.

Instead, they found reasonably-priced tickets for the bronze-medal game. As the game ended, though, the teenager embarked on a plan. Arena workers had a tight turnaround to clear the stands and get the building ready for the title game: The teenager would hide in a bathroom stall until the coast was clear, and when the doors re-opened to fans, she would return to the concourse for the gold-medal game.

Her cell phone battery died while she waited but, as the father wrote, she emerged from her spot when she heard shuffling outside. He wrote that she bumped into her hockey coach, who invited her to watch the gold-medal game in a suite.

“They must have been so nervous, leaving her in the arena by herself,” Delic said of her parents. “But she wanted to be a part of that moment. She would do anything for it, so she devised this whole plan.”

The email was too long to be read, word-for-word, on the podcast. But it has stuck with him.

“It wasn’t even a comment or anything,” said Delic. “It was just, ‘I want to share this thing with you that happened to my daughter, and was the best day of her life.’”

(Photo: Jeff Vinnick / NHLI via Getty Images)