Edmonton has been talked about during the finals as the entire Canadian team. Modest viewership numbers tell the harsh truth about interest, writes Urheilu’s NHL editor Tommi Seppälä.
Tommi Seppälä NHL reporter
FORT LAUDERDALE.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman gleefully banged his braces during his press conference on the opening day of the Stanley Cup Finals. The NHL is interesting, business is growing and the salary cap is rising, so the prospects for the future are good. On the other hand, when you look at the viewership of the final series on both sides of the border, the overall picture takes on a very different tone.
Of course, the NHL crunches the numbers skillfully, and after the first three finals matches, it has published the viewership numbers impressively, telling how big the growth has been compared to last year. For example, in the second game, the US side had an increase of 46 percent compared to last year. The match was watched by 3.6 million viewers on ESPN’s various platforms.
Of course, the NHL doesn’t say that nothing should be compared to the previous year’s finals. Vegas and Florida attracted an average of only 2.6 million viewers a year ago. Vegas is not a hockey market, nor is Florida, or Florida’s local rival, Tampa Bay.
When Tampa won the first of its two championships in 2020, the average viewership just topped two million.
When St. Louis and Boston forged the seventh final game five years ago, 8.5 million hockey fans watched the game on the side of the Yankees. The same figures were used in 2011 in the stoppage game between Vancouver and Boston. The final series of summer 2019 gathered an average of 5.3 million viewers, i.e. twice as many as a year ago.
So offering a growth story through the summer of 2023 does not tell the whole truth.
Canada, which has traditionally been considered a hockey-crazy country, has its own chapter. Of course it is.
Friday’s single win alone set off an unimaginable carnival in downtown Edmonton.
Outside of Edmonton, the sage did not waver, even though there has been a lot of desire to make the Oilers an all-Canadian team.
That’s not what it is.
It is somewhat confusing that a Canadian who strongly identifies with hockey does not care much about the final series if the team from his own village is not playing there. In a survey by The Globe and Mail as many as 58 percent of the respondents stated that they are not going to follow the final match series more closely. No, even if there is a Canadian team with the best hockey player in the world, a Canadian one at that.
The first final match was watched by only about 3.7 million viewers on the Canadian side. If about ten percent of the hockey-crazy population follows the NHL finals series, one cannot speak of a particularly hard hockey addiction outside of Edmonton. If around one and a half million people live in the greater Edmonton area, the rest of the country’s share of the viewership is ultimately very modest.
The NHL office should take the situation very seriously. The days in Canada seem far gone, when the legendary Hockey Night in Canada broadcast made families gather around the television on Saturdays. At that time, we watched the game that happened to be on TV.
The NHL should think carefully about why the consumer of hockey in Canada now only wants to scrape the icing off the cake.
When Montreal challenged Tampa in the final series in 2021, the viewership in Canada hovered around six million. Now we have barely reached half of that. Of course, Montreal speaks to the people in Canada differently than Edmonton, but someone could be worried about the trend.
When Toronto Rapports played in the 2019 NBA Finals, the Canadian side alone watched the matches around eight million people.
The fact that the opening final gathered a total of only 7.1 million people in front of the television on both sides of the border is a modest, if not downright poor, performance from the NHL. So about one percent of the US population followed the game.
And the trend has not been growing: the second game was watched by 6.8 million and the third game by only 6.5 million on both sides of the border.
Hockey’s status in Canada is not in danger, but it’s okay to ask why the NHL isn’t as interesting as it used to be? Has the game been cleaned up too much, or does the sport lack personalities and stories in the 2020s that would appeal to a wider audience?
It is really hard to guess the reasons for the trend. The only thing that is certain is that the numbers don’t lie.
The NHL can talk a hundred good things and a thousand beautiful things about its growth, but the viewership figures for the final games are hard to read.
In the United States, the sport is still very much on the margins, and what is most worrying, on the Canadian side, the NHL seems to have truly lost its importance among the people. There is plenty of work on both sides of the border.