La Soirée du hockey most frequently featured Montreal Canadiens games on Saturdayevenings, usually in parallel with English-language broadcasts on CBC. In later years CBC would drop some of its split-national telecasts in the 7:00pm ET window, resulting in a single national telecast at that time, while Radio-Canada would continue to feature the Canadiens. The broadcast would feature Quebec Nordiques and Ottawa Senators games occasionally during the regular season on rare occasions where the Canadiens were idle on Saturday night. During the playoffs, SDH would feature all games involving the Montreal Canadiens. After they were eliminated from further contention, the program would usually feature series of interest to French Canadians, up to and including the Stanley Cup Finals.
Beginning with the 2002–03 season, RDS secured exclusive French language rights to the NHL. The deal, reached with the Canadiens and not directly with the league, was meant to ensure a consistent home for all Canadiens games; as a general-interest network, Radio-Canada could not give up so much airtime to Canadiens games. The announcement drew the ire of, among others, then-Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, who suggested that the network would somehow be violating its conditions of licence by not airing La Soirée du hockey. In fact, there is no specific mention in the CBC's licence from the CRTC that the CBC's networks carry coverage of NHL games, nor that there be parity between the two networks' carriage of such games.
''Le Hockey du samedi soir''
Radio-Canada soon reached an agreement to produce the Saturday night games, to remain branded La Soirée du hockey, to be simulcast on both SRC and RDS. However, for reasons that are unclear, that agreement was terminated after the 2004 playoffs. The RDS-produced replacement, Le Hockey du samedi soir, was simulcast on SRC outside Quebec, where RDS has limited distribution, through 2006. French-language rights to NHL hockey became exclusive to RDS in 2006; the national package, including all Saturday broadcasts, then moved to TVA Sports in 2014. While Rogers has licensed the rights to the "Hockey Night in Canada" name from the CBC for its Saturday broadcasts, there has been no indication that the rights to the "La Soirée du hockey" branding are included in that deal. Instead, TVA Sports has branded its Saturday telecasts as La super soirée LNH and, unlike its English language counterpart, has not offered broadcasts to Radio-Canada.
