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When you embody the heart and soul AND soundtrack of a pro sports organization for 51 years, it can be hard to capture the impact you made on generations of players and fans.
For the Buffalo Sabres, that person was Rick Jeanneret, lovingly known as RJ within the organization. Jeanneret was the longtime play-by-play announcer for the Sabres on radio and television, beginning with the 1971-72 season and retiring in 2022.
Jeanneret was inducted into the Sabres Hall of Fame, the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame and ultimately the Hockey Hall of Fame. But he was most well-known for his energetic and memorable calls on the ice.
Back in 2021, Cara Murphy, Nico Ruggiero and the rest of the Sabres marketing and content teams started putting together plans for Jeanneret’s final season in the broadcast booth.
“Rick Jeanneret, RJ, was our announcer for so many years,” said Ruggiero, the Sabres’ digital marketing manager. “He was famous for his crazy calls through history. We all grew up with it. He was really meaningful to Buffalo and to me personally too.
“We knew that 2021-22 was going to be his last season. He had just been calling home games for awhile. We knew coming up that we were going to do an RJ Night and an RJ’s Last Call at the last game that he would announce. We wanted to do things throughout that season to just kind of honor him and his legacy with the team and community.”
The Sabres had started rolling out WIT activations that fall, promoting slot machine activations every game along with virtual t-shirt tosses and jersey giveaways.
“An idea came up that we should do a contest for what RJ’s best call was and let the fans vote,” Ruggiero recalled. “We brought the idea to WIT and pretty much asked what the best thing would be to accomplish this. We were thinking about doing a Vote to Win activation and the WIT team and Vaidhy Murti said essentially, ‘I think we can do even better than that.’ We wanted to run this over a longer period of time and March was a pretty natural fit. The bracket product didn’t exist at that time. But we talked through the idea and WIT got to work.”
The resulting WIT bracket contained eight initial matchups of 16 different video calls. Fans voted on each matchup and they advanced to four, two and then a final matchup of the two top calls.
When extending a voting contest out to so many different voting segments in a bracket display, a couple of key considerations came into play. The first was a premium visual experience on each matchup. The second was mobile optimization.
“When WIT started sending over the initial examples, it looked so cool,” Ruggiero said. “The videos would play when you hovered, it was scaled really well for mobile viewing which is obviously vital. It just navigated really well. Obviously, the most important piece was the audio. So the fact that when you hovered it played the audio was really important. It was designed well in that way.”
Instead of opening up every voting matchup at once, the Sabres and WIT decided to stagger them by different voting periods. That way, the team and fans could really dive into each set of memorable calls and give them the attention they deserved.
“We own our own broadcasts so we were able to integrate it really well where each week they would promote the matchups in pregame and intermissions and direct the viewers to vote,” Ruggiero said. “We really leaned into it. And that all created something to where on RJ Night and at his last call, we had this content where we showed what the fans picked. We played it on the videoboard. It was great. We really loved the activation.”
The Sabres ran the bracket for five weeks over February and March of 2022, garnering local media attention and tons of positive sentiment from fans on social media and during home games. The NHL league content team also featured it during the campaign run.
The Sabres even sent Vaidhy a custom signed Jeanneret jersey to celebrate its success.
But perhaps the most meaningful endorsement came from the man himself.
“I know from some of the stuff behind the scenes that RJ really enjoyed it,” Ruggiero said. “You want to make sure that a legend goes out on top.”
Rick Jeanneret passed away in August of 2023, just over a year after his final broadcast with the Sabres.
But whether it was ‘Top Shelf,’ ‘Scary Good’ or ‘May Day!’ Jeanneret’s voice and iconic imprint on the history of Buffalo and the Sabres organization will live on forever.
