Kraken TV Analyst Olczyk On Finding His Way Home

Kraken color analyst Eddie Olczyk has spent the summer back home in Illinois with family and friends slowly realizing he’s no longer ready to shed those warm memories once the weather turns colder. 

Such thoughts had creeped in on Olczyk for the past two seasons of a hockey life lived largely on the road, commuting between his permanent Chicago area residence, an East Side condominium and dozens of Kraken Hockey Network and national TNT games. Finally, with his 60th birthday next month, Olczyk decided it was time to pull away from local TV broadcast work that’s dominated his prior two decades and just do his national games so he can be there more for those who’ve supported him through years of personal triumphs and tumult. 

“I’ve done the same schedule for the last 20 years,” Olczyk said referencing his Kraken and prior Chicago Blackhawks television work with national games added in. “It just comes to a point where you have to make a decision. It’s been in the making, and I just thought this was the time that I wanted to be home more.” 

Olczyk worked 65 games last season, including playoffs, for TNT and national radio in addition to his Kraken coverage. And the combo of that and the added Kraken games as well, often requiring cross-country travel for days at a time, became a lot.

His departure will be the only change to the KHN lineup this coming season, with JT Brown sliding back in as the lone primary color analyst alongside play-by-play mainstay John Forslund. Brown and Forslund worked exclusively as a duo together during the Kraken’s debut 2021-22 season before Olczyk arrived in what became a three-man booth the ensuing four years. 

Still, Brown and Forslund did continue as a duo in recent seasons when Olczyk’s national schedule came into play, building a chemistry that should enable this to become a more seamless transition. 

Olczyk said he feels immensely fortunate to be healthy now after a highly publicized battle with Stage 3 colon cancer that began nine years ago. Through that ordeal and years overcoming after-effects from the illness, his wife, Diana, three sons and a daughter supported him, and he now wants to return the favor by being more present in their lives. 

“Everything has revolved around my hockey career since 1988 when I got married to my wife,” Olczyk said. “Everything has been centered around my schedule. Well, that’s changing. And now’s the time.” 

Olczyk, who said the Kraken were “extremely supportive” as he pondered his future, will continue national work for TNT to keep a foothold within a sport that’s given so much to the former NHL player and head coach-turned-broadcaster and U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame member. But there’s a world of difference between doing select national games traveling to and from a centralized Chicago home base and navigating thousands of miles regularly between two residences with the daily grind of a Kraken schedule as his primary job. 

“I thought about it and I tried to fight through it,” Olczyk said of living in two places at once. “And it just got to a point where with my family, everything has been based around my cycle and my life. And the most respectful way of going about it from here is, I’m not going to be selfish anymore. I know what needs to happen.”

After being drafted third overall by the Blackhawks in 1984, Chicago-born centerman Olczyk played 1,031 regular-season NHL games over 16 seasons with six teams, scoring 342 goals and adding 452 assists. He also played for Team USA at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and coached the Pittsburgh Penguins for parts of two seasons beginning in 2003-04, compiling a record of 31-64-8-10. 

As a player, his wife and children followed him around to his new stops. The lone exception prior to his Kraken gig had been when he’d worked three seasons as an analyst for Penguins games. 

“I commuted from Chicago to Pittsburgh for three years from 2000 to 2003 until I moved to Pittsburgh full-time to become a coach,” Olczyk said. “So, when you add in the Kraken, it’s been seven years now that I’ve commuted. This was only the second time that I’d decided to commute and not uproot my whole family like I’d done my entire NHL career.” 

But Chicago is where his family is based, aside from his son, Nick, a former Kraken broadcaster now entering his third season working for the Utah Mammoth. Olczyk counts his two seasons working alongside his son, where they roomed together at the East Side condo, among his Kraken highlights. 

A major reason he took the Kraken job in September 2022 was to be closer to his brother, Ricky, who was and remains a Kraken assistant general manager also commuting back and forth from Chicago. Their mother had passed away just months prior, and the brothers felt working in the same organization was a dream chance they might never have again. 

“It’s all been about family and relationships,” Olczyk said. “I mean, my brother and Nicky. My son Eddie is a Kraken scout. And there was also Ronnie (his former NHL teammate and later Kraken GM and President Ron Francis), who’s one of my best friends. 

“I’ll never forget that unbelievable second (Kraken) year and getting within one goal of the conference final, but it still always comes down to relationships, especially with the game crew who you spend so much time with on the road," Olczyk said. "With JT (Brown), he’d played with my oldest son, so I had a relationship with him. But there was also getting to develop a relationship with Piper (Shaw) and then of course working with Johnny (Forslund). There’s nobody better in the game that is a play-by-play guy, and I got to sit next to him.” 

Forslund said he’ll miss their regular camaraderie and jocularity shared on Kraken airwaves after working national games together over the years. But he understands Olczyk’s family-oriented decision and the timing behind it given the stresses of cross-country commuting. 

“There are challenges and there is separation, and you have to be 100% comfortable in that mindset in order to make it work,” Forslund said. “And if you’re not, for whatever reason -- whether it be family, or, God forbid, health, or maybe you’re just done with it and don’t want to go to another airport -- those are things that creep into a decision. I support him 100% support because he’s such a dear friend and a great colleague and one of the best – if not the best – people I’ve ever worked with and hopefully still will on a national basis. So, I get it. I understand what he’s up against and how he came to this decision.” 

Forslund noted that he and Brown paired together often as a booth duo as Olczyk’s work for the Kraken became more infrequent and was limited to 21 games the past season due to national work and family commitments. He feels their familiarity and Brown, who’d had almost no broadcast experience upon joining the Kraken, getting to see Olczyk work the past four years will help the permanent transition back to a two-man booth. 

“He’s had an opportunity to see how Eddie does it and learn from that,” Forslund said. “He’s been a sponge in a lot of ways.” 

Forslund added that he’s excited about what the coming season will hold as he and Brown now take their years of working together to a higher level. 

“I think it’s exciting to see how it develops organically,” he said. “Because whatever we do has to be organic and that’s been the case from the beginning for he and I. We had no frame of reference in knowing each other. But this was a chance for JT and I to grow a friendship, which we’ve now formulated. And to grow an on-air partnership which we now have. Now, we’re going to get consistency.” 

As for Brown, who’d teamed in junior hockey with Olczyk’s son, Eddie, with the Waterloo Blackhawks of the USHL, getting the chance to build on his prior relationship with the broadcaster is something he’ll cherish. 

“I have nothing but good things to say about him,” Brown said. “We obviously knew each other from before, but this took things to an entirely different level where I got to watch one of the best and add and grow from what I’d been doing. His preparation is second to none and there’s really nothing going on in the game at any given moment that he wasn’t fully aware of.” 

Brown said he, like many fans, will clearly miss the unique on-air banter between Olczyk and Forslund built off years of knowing one another.  

“I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about most of the time,” he said with a laugh. “But you clearly have to respect him for making this decision and doing what he feels is best for himself and those closest to him.” 

And Brown won’t even try to emulate what Olczyk and Forslund had. He knows you must “be yourself” in broadcasting, and that’s what he’ll do in solidifying his existing on-air rapport with Forslund. 

“We’ve known each other a while now,” he said. “And that’s an important thing that comes with time.” 

And time, as they say, is not immortal. For Olczyk, his recalibrating time spent with his actual family, including four grandchildren, as opposed to just his hockey family didn’t come easy. 

“As I said, it’s all about the people in the game and the people that I got a chance to know,” he said of his Kraken experience. “I never thought four years ago that this was possible. I thought I’d always be in Chicago. I never thought the opportunity would present itself, let alone that I’d act on it. But I gave it a go and it’s been a blast. It’s been a lot of fun. 

“But it’s time now. And home is where I want to be.”