The Canada-heavy Stanley Cup Playoffs have not been friendly for viewership in the United States.
Through the Conference Finals, NHL playoff viewership is down significantly across both of the league’s media rights partners. According to Austin Karp of Sports Business Journal, playoff games across TNT, TBS, and truTV have averaged just 947,000 viewers, down 20% versus this point last season.
Over on the ESPN family of networks, the numbers look even worse. Across ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC, Stanley Cup Playoff games are averaging 966,000 viewers, down 31% compared to last season.
Luckily for the league, Canadian viewership is making up for a lackluster American audience. Per Karp, audiences north of the border are averaging 1.97 million viewers per game, up 21%. In total, that adds up to an average of 2.9 million viewers per game across the United States and Canada.
The Canadian flare has done no favors for NHL viewership stateside, but another important factor is how noncompetitive both Conference Finals series were. This season, both the Eastern Conference Finals and the Western Conference Finals went just five games. Last season, both series went six games.
Stanley Cup Finals viewership will almost certainly take a big hit this season, no matter how competitive the series is. Even though it’s a rematch of last year’s Stanley Cup Final between the Edmonton Oilers and Florida Panthers, this year’s series will be relegated to the TNT Sports cable networks rather than the ABC broadcast channel. Naturally, the decrease in reach of a cable network compared to broadcast will adversely impact the ratings. Not to mention, last year’s series went the distance to a Game 7, earning 7.7 million viewers on ABC.
The decline is to be expected, though. That’s what the NHL signed up for when it split its Stanley Cup Finals rights between ESPN/ABC and TNT Sports.
One silver lining: next year’s ratings comparisons will be pretty favorable for the NHL, assuming a few more American teams can find some success and the series can go a bit longer.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.