Gary Bettman and the NHL have a lot to be proud of. After Covid-19 upended the world in March, the league salvaged its season, safely held its playoffs, awarded the Stanley Cup and provided its fans with an outstanding product. However, the one thing Bettman and Co. didn’t deliver was strong TV ratings.
The NHL Playoffs, sans the Stanley Cup, drew an average of 845,000 viewers on NBC, NBCSN and its digital channels, according to Sportico. It was a notable 28 percent decrease from the 1.18 million it drew a year earlier. The six-game Stanley Cup Final between the Tampa Bay and Dallas Stars didn’t fare much better.
An average of 2.03 million viewers watched Lightning-Stars, according to Awful Announcing, and the 2.88 million tuning in for the clinching game was less than “Monday Night Football, but also various cable news programs, Dancing With the Stars on ABC, and reruns of both The Neighborhood and Young Sheldon on CBSVIAC.” The 2020 Stanley Cup Final had the second-lowest audience since the 2004-05 lockout, second only to 2007’s Ducks-Senators.
As Sportico’s Anthony Crupi wrote, “The usual caveats apply.” The NHL was faced with playing its postseason nearly three months later than usual and competed with a pandemic-delayed, jam-packed sports calendar. The Stanley Cup Final “aired opposite two Monday Night Football telecasts, two consecutive Saturdays of college football action and a pair of NBA Eastern Conference Finals games.”
Those numbers would be far more concerning were it not for the months-long global pandemic. Yet, they’re still an unequivocal reminder playoff hockey doesn’t work at this time of the year.
Even though the Cup Final typically stretches into June, it goes without saying that the NHL has a longstanding tradition as a winter sport. The league’s collection of outdoor games – the Winter Classic, Heritage Classic and Stadium Series – are some of its highest attended and watched events. The last two Winter Classics drew an average of 80,878 fans in attendance and 2.47 million TV viewers, according to Sports Media Watch.
A shift in the schedule doesn’t make these games impossible – the NHL played an outdoor game in California five years ago – but much more challenging to stage. But the more pressing issue is how a September championship pits hockey against Major League Baseball, college football, the NFL and, in this case, the NBA too.
The NHL, which has consistently lagged behind its competitors in ratings, is now fighting for an even smaller pie. This week’s Monday Night Football matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Baltimore Ravens averaged 14 million viewers, according to CNBC, crushing the Lightning’s Stanley Cup-clinching Game 6 victory.
It’s only going to get worse next season. If the NHL calendar again runs through the summer, hockey will air opposite the newly scheduled 2021 Tokyo Olympics. That itself is inherently complicated because NBC owns the broadcast rights to both. Competing against the Olympics could drive the NHL’s postseason ratings down, which could be devastating as the league seeks to renegotiate its expiring $2 billion TV contract with NBC. (The NHL paused negotiations for its media rights until the end of 2020, according to Sports Business Journal.)
There’s no overnight solution. It’s impossible to say when the effects of Covid-19 will fully be resolved, and the NHL still has designs on playing a full 82-game slate in 2020-21, even if opening night slips into January.
How they’ll do so is unclear, though. NHLPA executive director Donald Fehr expressed little desire to create another bubble environment earlier this week. The NHL is also heavily dependent on gate revenue, and whether fans will be allowed to return to games is at the whim of government restrictions.
But it is imperative Bettman and the NHLPA find a way to normalize the league’s calendar. Otherwise, hockey will continue to fight a losing battle for viewers against its contemporaries.
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