Sports

Barry Melrose, Entertaining ESPN Hockey Analyst, Dies at 70

Nairavoice · Sep 10, 2026 · 7 min read

Barry Melrose, the blue-collar NHL defenseman who brought flash to the Los Angeles Kings as their coach and fun to ESPN during his nearly three decades as a colorful hockey analyst, has died. He was 70.

National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman confirmed Melrose’s death in a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “From the flowing locks of his distinctive mullet to the flared lapels of his trademark long suit coats, Barry Melrose cut an unmistakable figure whenever you were fortunate enough to run into him at a rink or catch him on your television screen. You were even more fortunate if you engaged him in conversation or listened to his analysis, because he never failed to boost your love of the game of hockey,” he wrote.

“A rangy and rugged defenseman from Kelvington, Saskatchewan, Barry fashioned an 11-year pro career in the NHL, AHL and WHA. But it was as a coach, who guided the Los Angeles Kings to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final, and as a broadcaster, who spent 27 years at ESPN, that he truly made his mark upon the game. And during those countless encounters over the years with players, coaches, fans and viewers who couldn’t help but be drawn in by his enthusiasm.

“We mourn the passing of a hockey original. And we send our deepest condolences to his wife, Cindy, their sons, Tyrell and Adrien, and all of his teammates, colleagues and admirers around the hockey world,” Bettman concluded.

Melrose’s cause of death wasn’t immediately available. In October 2023, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was retiring.

“I’ve had over 50 extraordinary years playing, coaching and analyzing the world’s greatest game, hockey,” he said then in a statement. “It’s now time to hang up my skates and focus on my health, my family, including my supportive wife, Cindy, and whatever comes next.”

As a cigar-loving coach who sported a carefully groomed hairstyle (a mullet) and a closet full of $2,000 suits — a hockey version of the Los Angeles Lakers’ Pat Reilly, if you will — Melrose took the Wayne Gretzky-led Kings to the precipice of their first Stanley Cup in 1993 in his first season guiding an NHL team.

Just 30 minutes after the Kings fired him in April 1995 near the end of his third season, Melrose was signed by ESPN to work as a studio analyst during the upcoming NHL playoffs. He called games part-time the next season before joining the network as a full-time analyst for the 1996-97 campaign.

“When [people] watch me on TV, I want them to go, ‘Geez, I’d like to go for a beer with Barry Melrose and talk hockey. He seems like he’d be very interesting,'” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995.

Barry Melrose coached the Tampa Bay Lightning for 16 games in 2008.

He left ESPN in June 2008 to coach the Tampa Bay Lightning, but that stint would last just five wins and 16 games before he got canned again. However, he was back on ESPN in 2009.

Melrose and Steve Levy reported from every Stanley Cup Final from 1994 until 2022. When Levy announced on the eve of the 2023 series that his ESPN colleague would not continue that streak, it led some to wonder if he were ill.

The third of four kids, Barry James Melrose was born on July 15, 1956, in Kelvington, Saskatchewan — a town of 900 people located 400 miles northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba — and raised on a nearby farm. His father, James, built a rink on their property, and Melrose started skating when he could walk.

When he was 5, he took his first stick to the face and got a black eye. Later, he sold four pigs so he could buy his first pair of Tackaberry ice skates. His favorite NHL player was Tim Horton, a defenseman.

Melrose played three seasons of junior hockey with the Weyburn Red Wings and Kamloops Chiefs from 1973-76, then joined the Cincinnati Stingers of the World Hockey Association in 1976-77 after he was selected with the 37th pick in the WHA Draft. (He had been taken 36th by the Montreal Canadiens in that year’s NHL Draft.)

After 178 games over three seasons with the Stingers, he appeared in 300 NHL games with the Winnipeg Jets, Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings through the 1985-86 season, collecting 10 goals and 23 assists to go with a whopping 728 penalty minutes. At 6-feet and 205 pounds, he was not afraid to mix it up.

Barry Melrose in 1981 with the Toronto Maple Leafs

He finished his playing career with the American Hockey League’s Adirondack Red Wings in 1986-87, and guided the Medicine Hat Tigers to the Western Hockey League championship in 1988 in his first season as a coach.

He then led the WHL’s Seattle Thunderbirds for one season and Adirondack for three more, with the Red Wings winning the Calder Cup in 1992, when he also served as the team’s G.M.

The Kings, owned back then by the free-spending Bruce McNall, won a bidding war with the Detroit Red Wings, signing Melrose to a four-year contract in June 1992 to replace Tom Webster as their coach. The deal was worth a reported $1.3 million, believed to be the most ever paid for a first-time NHL coach to that point.

With Melrose behind the bench, the Kings, led by Wayne Gretzky, Luc Robitaille, Jari Kurri, Dave Taylor and Marty McSorley, edged the Maple Leafs on the road in Game 7 of the 1993 conference finals to advance to their first Stanley Cup Final.

“His idea of how the game should be played focused on speed — speed that would highlight the talents of the skilled players. I was in total agreement on that,” Gretzky wrote in the foreword to Melrose’s 2012 book, Dropping the Gloves: Inside the Fiercely Combative World of Professional Hockey.

“He and I had a meeting of the minds on day one. From then on, it was a pleasure playing for him. Sometimes it was an adventure, because Barry was always willing to try things.”

Said Robitaille in the 2012 book A Season in Time, “If Barry had his way, you would never take a backward step.”

The Kings would fall to the Canadiens in the Stanley Cup Final in five games, three of them in overtime, and miss the playoffs the next season. Melrose was then fired in April 1995 — three months after Gretzky was traded to the St. Louis Blues — with seven games left in the regular season and Los Angeles desperate to make the postseason (it didn’t).

The Kings were also in a financial bind. “We used to eat at Spago,” he told reporters, “and now we can’t even get into a Sizzler.” His record with L.A. was 79-101-29.

Nearly 13 years later, Melrose exited ESPN to go to Tampa to replace John Tortorella, who in 2004 had coached the Lightning to its first Stanley Cup.

“I think if I wouldn’t have taken the job, I would have been a hypocrite,” Melrose told The New York Times. “I’m sitting up there criticizing other people [at ESPN]. If you have a chance to get back in the fight and you don’t take it, I would have been very disappointed with myself to not have the courage to do that.”

But six weeks into the season, he was fired, and critics said he had lost touch with current strategies. Lucky for hockey fans, he would get a second shift on television.

In a video narrated by Gretzky, ESPN paid tribute to him after his retirement announcement.

Melrose was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in March 1998, and in 2004, he and Levy became part-owners of the now-defunct Adirondack Frostbite of the United Hockey League.

He played himself in the Russell Crowe-starring Mystery, Alaska (1999), on a 2001 episode of ABC’s Spin City and in Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice (2002).

In an undated interview, Melrose noted that you need drive in any endeavor to be a success. “It’s gotta eat you up,” he said. “You get out what you put in. If you put in nothing, then you will get nothing. If you put in tons, then you will get tons out.”

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