NHL posts solid viewership in return from 4 Nations hiatus

The NHL posted some encouraging numbers over the weekend for the league’s first games following the rousing success of the 4 Nations Face-Off.

According to data from Jon Lewis of Sports Media Watch, Saturday’s ABC doubleheader featuring a Washington Capitals-Pittsburgh Penguins game and a Minnesota Wild-Detroit Red Wings game both posted double-digit increases over last year. Caps-Pens averaged 1.1 million viewers on ABC, up 15% from New York Rangers-Philadelphia Flyers last season (957,000 viewers). Wild-Red Wings averaged 944,000 viewers, up 21% versus the St. Louis Blues and Red Wings a year prior (779,000 viewers).

That’s nice viewership for the NHL, but doesn’t exactly show signs of any audience bump from the 4 Nations Face-Off as some might have expected. In fact, the ABC doubleheader that aired right before the 4 Nations Face-Off began actually averaged more viewers than Saturday’s doubleheader (1.12 million viewers compared to 1.02 million viewers).

Sunday, TNT also posted modest gains for a Rangers-Penguins game that averaged 560,000 viewers, up 6% from Flyers-Penguins last year. It was TNT’s largest NHL regular season audience of the season when excluding the Winter Classic.

As Lewis points out in his piece, seeing meaningful viewership increases off the back of international competitions is uncommon. For example, the 2010 Olympic gold medal hockey game between Canada and the United States drew nearly 28 million viewers on NBC, but NHL viewership was “largely unchanged” afterwards.

Any sustained viewership gains post-4 Nations will need some more data points before a definitive conclusion is reached. But for now, each of the NHL’s four national window games last weekend posted year-over-year increases, which at least gives the league a solid narrative coming out of its successful international experiment.