Paul Bissonnette, Spittin’ Chiclets take on TV with altcast that aims to be NHL

Like so many things in today’s day and age, the idea for Spittin’ Chiclets was born from … a tweet.

Nine years ago, Ryan Whitney, then freshly retired as an NHL player, hopped on a train in New York City and tweeted @BizNasty2point0 — the Twitter account of Paul Bissonnette, the Coyotes bruiser who he’d hit it off with during a long-ago Pittsburgh Penguins camp — “I really want to start a podcast. About hockey, trending topics, life in general. Need a partner.”

Bissonnette, always the jokester, always self-deprecating, wrote back: “One day @ryanwhitney6. I still like playing. I have two goals this year. Doubled last year’s total already. It’s a Christmas miracle.”

Brian McGonagle, a.k.a. “Rear Admiral,” was doing freelance work for Barstool Sports at the time. He saw the tweets and replied. He was ready and willing to be Whitney’s partner. The two exchanged direct messages, and from there, the original Spittin’ Chiclets podcast was founded.

Not long after that, Mike Grinnell, a.k.a. “Grinnelli,” reached out via email saying he’d like to produce the podcast and make it sound better. He was just a kid working at a radio station at the time.

“R.A. ignored the email, and then two weeks later, the next podcast they did, the mixer broke,” Bissonnette says, laughing. “So he remembered the email, reached out to Grinnelli, and next thing you know, he joined on, they kept going and Barstool got ’em.”

After retiring from the NHL, Bissonnette joined the Arizona Coyotes as a broadcaster. After his first year on the job, Whitney called him again.

“He’s like, ‘Hey, we need somebody else,’ Bissonnette remembers. “‘I want to snap it around with another hockey guy, not just R.A.’”

Bissonnette again declined. He wanted to secure and solidify his job with the Coyotes. But eventually, the idea got to him. He agreed to join. And from there, the podcast took off. Guests like Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon came on, “and it just took on a mind of its own,” Bissonnette says.

These days, Spittin’ Chiclets is one of the biggest, most popular hockey pods out there. It averages more than 635,000 downloads and views per episode, has 2.9 million social media followers and over 550 million original video views.

Bissonnette, meanwhile, has become one of the faces of NHL broadcasting, moonlighting on the panel of NHL on TNT.

On Wednesday night — for one night at least, with TNT televising the Panthers-Penguins game — those worlds will collide and create a new frontier for the podcast. Bissonnette will walk off the NHL on TNT set at the network’s Atlanta headquarters, stroll over to the Inside the NBA studio next door and take part in the first-ever Spittin’ Chiclets “altcast,” with Whitney, R.A. and sports betting expert and former hockey player Matt Murley.

Spittin’…