Inside Look at How Sphere, NHL Collaborated To Make the 2024 NHL Draft a Must-See Event

‘Sphere is a blank canvas 45 billion times bigger than any other you have ever worked with’

At the 2024 Upper Deck NHL Draft tonight, all eyes will be on the San Jose Sharks when they make the first pick. But there will also be plenty of eyes on the venue hosting the event: Sphere, which, in less than a year, has become an icon on the Las Vegas skyline from the outside and a next-generation concert venue on the inside. For the first time ever, the venue will host an event that is truly unscripted and will require content viewed from both the inside and the outside of Sphere to pivot in a moment’s notice.

“It’s this blank canvas that happens to be 45 billion times bigger than any other blank canvas you have ever worked with,” says Steve Mayer, chief content officer/senior EVP, NHL.

The 2024 NHL Draft will be the first event broadcast live from the Sphere in Las Vegas.

The NHL Draft will mark several firsts for Sphere, including being the first live telecast from inside Sphere and the first time that content on the interior display plane will be optimized for both the fans in the venue and the viewing audience at home.

“We’re going to have some very cool creative elements on the outside of the Sphere,” notes Mayer. “We’re taking advantage of the whole place, every inch of it.”

This is also the first event in which Sphere Studios, the immersive-content studio dedicated to creating multi-sensory entertainment experiences exclusively for the venue, led the design and creation of content for both the interior display plane and the Exosphere. The team worked closely with the NHL design team and creative-services department to create custom content for both the interior display — the world’s highest-resolution LED screen — and the venue’s exterior — the world’s largest LED screen.

“We started to visualize what we thought it could look like and then educated the Sphere Studios team as they had to learn the beats of a live Draft,” says Mayer. “We gave them sort of a blueprint of things, and then we started to mesh creatively and see where we could go. It has been an incredibly collaborative process. We’ve been out to the Minisphere [the facility in Burbank, CA, where elements can be developed] five or six times to look at the content and see what it will look like in the environment.”

The content displayed on the interior display has been optimized for the television audience as well as for fans in the venue. That content includes custom graphics for all 32 NHL teams, key statistical highlights and notable former picks for each club, and an immersive selection board while each team is on the clock.

One of the challenges is that the canvas is not designed for an unscripted event. The entire production for shows by musical acts U2, Phish, and Dead and Company are locked down by showtime. But an NHL Draft? No one knows who will be picked next or whether there will be last-second trades or even picks swapped. “We’ve got to react to things like a trade or pick swap and then change the environment [both inside and out],” Mayer says.

The project began while Sphere was still under construction. Mayer visited first when it was just a shell, a second time about a month out from opening, and on opening night last October, when U2 inaugurated its residency.

“It was something unique, something different,” Mayer says. “That’s what gets my blood going, and so I was fascinated. I came back from opening night and said, ‘We’ve got to do an event there.’ It felt like we could pull off the Draft there; we immediately started focusing on it. The commissioner liked the idea. He has a great relationship with [Executive Chairman/Chief Executive Officer, Sphere Entertainment] Jim Dolan, and we were able to work out a working agreement very quickly.”

The NHL has also worked with Germany-based augmented-reality–content creator Gravity. “They’ve been incredible as well, just adding to some of the creative elements,” says Mayer. “In this environment, you need the visuals but also the audio and even the haptics in the seat. There are just so many different things that you are creating.”

In another groundbreaking first for Sphere, footage from the live television broadcast will be incorporated into custom graphics and displayed on the Exosphere throughout the event. The Exosphere moments, specific to Round 1 tonight, will mark a new level of engagement for fans in Las Vegas and around the world.

“We are going to have elements on the outside of the Sphere that will just blow people away,” Mayer says. “When a pick is made, you’re going to see it on the outside of the Sphere.”

One of the fascinating visual experiences inside the Sphere is the ability to force the perspective on the screen with video elements creating the illusion that the curved screen has depth, even corners: it appears to transform from a dome to a square room or even seems to have a roof hundreds of feet tall.

“Changing the environment of the room is definitely something that was sparked when we saw the other shows,” says Mayer. “There’ll be elements during the night when we do that, transporting people to somewhere else.”

During the Draft, multiple cameras will capture the kiss-and-cry–type moments as players are selected. “The players will be on the 100 level,” he points out. “The fans in the 300 level won’t see them unless we put them on screen.”

Mayer will be sitting in the production truck with the director and producer, creating the feed delivered to broadcasters.

“I am going to be there as the entertainment producer,” he explains, “because we will need to shoot a little wider and show Sphere in its glory. We’ve got a railcam and drones, and all those things will capture the bigness of it on the world feed. But we’re going to be doing things that are different and cool and will make it unique.”