IIHF Media Award

During the 2025 IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship, short profiles of each of this year's Hall of Fame inductees will appear on IIHF.com in the build-up to the IIHF Hall of Fame weekend (May 24-25). There will be two ceremonies. The Contributors' Awards ceremony takes place on May 24, followed by the IIHF Hall of Fame Induction ceremony on May 25. Both ceremonies will be shown live on the IIHF's YouTube channel and IIHF.TV.

When he retired in early 2005, Paul Graham held the title of vice-president and executive producer of live events for TSN, capping a 45-year career in broadcasting that most memorably took the World Junior Championship out of its nascent stage and into an event that has become part of so many households across Canada and throughout the world over Christmas and New Year’s.

Back in 1992, TSN’s coverage of the World Juniors extended only to Canada’s games. Under Graham’s enthusiastic push to expand, TSN then included teams from Canada’s group, then games in the secondary venue, and, finally, every game of the tournament. And the coverage is no longer limited to Canada. Many countries around the IIHF world have full coverage now thanks to Graham’s ambitions.

“That’s been a personal goal of mine since Day One,” Graham once said. “It’s a big event. You want to make it big, and you want to make it look big all the time. One of the things I’m proudest of looking back is that it’s not just big in Canada. It’s not just Canada’s tradition anymore. It’s a lot of countries. When I did the first one in Fussen, Germany, in 1992, we only did about five games at the tournament, and they only went to Canada. Now countries like Sweden and Finland carry every game of the tournament. All the participating countries have a TV package where they’re watching these games.”

Graham grew up in Edmonton and regularly snuck into CFL games in his youth before being hired as a spotter by the CBC in 1980. He worked at the Canadian Football Network as a producer from 1987 to 1991 after which he was hired by TSN in the same capacity. He was hired as a senior producer for Hockey Night in Canada in 1997 and worked in the same role for the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, the first to feature NHL players. In 2003, Graham was named senior producer and director at Raptors TV, a position he held for six years before returning to TSN. Since then, “PG” and TSN has added to its IIHF portfolio extensively, now covering the Men’s World Championship, Women’s Worlds, and Men’s and Women’s U18. At the 2025 World Juniors, Graham used drones for the first time, trying new things right to the end.

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